Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

TWENTY

A Soldier at Heart

IN APRIL 2007, THE QUEEN SAT FOR HER FIRST PORTRAIT BY AN American, the celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz. Not only was the sitting limited by her schedule to just twenty-five minutes, it was to be filmed for yet another television documentary about the Queen carrying out her duties. She agreed to wear the stunning Queen Mary tiara, the Nizam of Hyderabad diamond necklace, a white satin gown embroidered with gold, and her flowing dark blue Garter robe. Leibovitz was surprised to learn that Elizabeth II did her own makeup and got her hair done just once a week.

In a brief conversation the evening before the photo shoot, the Queen spoke fondly to Leibovitz about British photographer Jane Bown, an octogenarian who had done her portrait the previous year. “She came all the way by herself!” the Queen said. “I helped her move the furniture.” Leibovitz replied, “Well, tomorrow is going to be the opposite of that.”

Unusually for a woman who prided herself on punctuality, the Queen arrived twenty minutes late for her sitting. “I don’t have much time,” the Queen said to the photographer, who noticed that the dressers “were staying about 20 feet away from her.”

Elizabeth II was clearly vexed to be surrounded by the photographer’s large entourage. When Leibovitz asked her to remove her “crown” to make the image less dressy, the Queen said, “Less dressy! What do you think this is?” But she calmed down and yielded to the photographer’s requests to vary her costume and her pose. Leibovitz later said she loved the Queen’s “feisty” personality and respected her willingness to fulfill her commitment, however tiring and stressful.

The resulting images were stunning. The most striking showed the Queen without the tiara and wearing a simple navy boat cloak with gleaming brass buttons, her arms and hands unseen, standing in front of a digitally superimposed background of a wintry sky and the bare trees of the Palace gardens. It was a frank attempt by Leibovitz to evoke earlier iconic images by Beaton and Annigoni symbolizing the Queen’s solitude, as well as “an appropriate mood for this moment in the Queen’s life.”

The photos were unveiled on the eve of the Queen’s tenth trip to the United States, and her third state visit, this time hosted by George and Laura Bush. Before her departure, she gave a reception at Buckingham Palace for 350 prominent Americans in London. Washington Post correspondent Kevin Sullivan joined one of the small semicircles of people to be introduced to the Queen, which also included Don Johnson, who was starring in Guys and Dolls in the West End, Terence Kooyker and Andrew Wright, who were rowers at Oxford, and Brian McBride, one of the top players for the Fulham professional football team.

The Queen showed no sign of knowing that Johnson had starred in the hit television series Miami Vice, but when she was introduced to the rowers, she asked to see their big hands, which were covered with calluses and blisters. “The Queen examined them closely, and sympathized as if the young men were her grandchildren,” recalled Sullivan, who also noticed that she had “a disarming habit of smiling only when she finds something funny” and lacked “the political perma-smile.” As she was talking to McBride, another man ignored protocol and barged into the group. “Do you play football too?” the Queen asked. “No,” he replied. “I sell pancake and waffle mix, mostly in the Middle East.” “How interesting what people will eat,” said the Queen, as she turned to approach another group.

Elizabeth II and Philip arrived in Richmond, Virginia, on Thursday, May 3. In a speech to the Virginia legislature she expressed her condolences for the massacre at Virginia Tech the previous week in which a lone gunman killed thirty students and teachers before committing suicide. She also adjusted her schedule to meet a group of survivors of the shooting. Then she traveled to Jamestown, where she commemorated the four hundredth anniversary of the first British settlement—fifty years after her first visit during the Eisenhower presidency. Surveying the archaeological relics, she spotted exhibit 15, an iron spatula labeled “for severe constipation.” She beckoned her traveling physician, Commander David Swain, who was always only a few steps away with his large black case containing vital medications and blood plasma. Pointing at the crude implement, she exclaimed, “You should have some things like that!”

Over the weekend she fulfilled her lifelong dream of attending the Kentucky Derby, and for the fifth time she was a guest at the Farish farm. The former ambassador and his wife remained close to the Queen, and once again Sarah Farish greeted her by publicly kissing her on both cheeks.

Elizabeth II was no longer sending as many mares to Kentucky. The center of gravity among breeders had shifted to the powerhouse stud farms of Ireland, which offered high-caliber stallions for her to choose from without subjecting her mares to transatlantic travel. It had been politically impossible for her to send her mares across the Irish Sea until the 1998 Northern Ireland peace settlement took effect. Now her new bloodstock adviser, Henry Carnarvon’s son-in-law John Warren, was trying to invigorate the royal thoroughbred line and make it more competitive, in the hopes that the Queen could finally win the elusive Derby at Epsom.

But the Queen still enjoyed relaxing in bluegrass country with like-minded friends she had known for decades, and for the first time Philip was along to share the experience. In the garden at Lane’s End Farm, she sipped a late afternoon martini and fretted about the performance of Princess Anne’s daughter, Zara Phillips, at the Badminton Horse trials. “Nobody pays any attention to what Granny thinks!” she said.

At the Kentucky Derby on Saturday, the Queen was intrigued by the winning jockey, Calvin Borel, a Cajun who could barely read and write but was known for his uncanny affinity for horses. Anticipating the Queen’s interest, Laura Bush had set aside two places at the state dinner two days later and extended an invitation to Borel. Amy Zantzinger, her social secretary, arranged for him to be outfitted in white tie, and for a Louisville dress shop to be opened on Sunday so his fiancée could buy a gown.

George Bush managed to inject a note of unintended levity in his opening remarks on the White House South Lawn before seven thousand guests on Monday, the 7th. “You helped our nation celebrate its bicentennial in 177—uh 1976,” he said. After a beat, he winked at the Queen and said, “She gave me a look only a mother could give a child.” Elizabeth II and Philip had a quiet lunch upstairs in the Yellow Oval Room with members of the Bush family, including the forty-first president and Barbara Bush, who accompanied the royal couple to the World War II memorial on the Mall, the last stop in a fast-paced two-day visit that included stops at NASA and the Children’s National Medical Center.

Other than a short walk with the president and first lady from the White House to Blair House aross the street on the first day, the Queen was barely seen by the general public. The crowd of one thousand in the cordoned area included numerous children, and the Queen stopped to talk to them along the way. One member of her entourage commented that “it was sad that security was so tight. Even the walk was stage-managed.”

That afternoon at the British embassy garden party, the Queen spotted her friend Frolic Weymouth and went straight over to him. “So glad to see you,” she said with a smile. “How are you? I heard you were sick.” The artist knew she collected pepper grinders, so earlier in the year he had sent her one made of plastic that he found in an Italian restaurant. It was in the shape of a waiter, and with a turn of the head, a recording inside said in an Italian accent, “You’re breaking my neck!” Weymouth had received a prompt thank-you note from the Queen saying how much she had laughed. At the garden party as they finished their conversation, he said, “Oh Ma’am, do you need another pepper shaker?” At that point, Weymouth recalled, “she lost it. She started laughing and hitting her pocketbook. Then she became dignified again and moved on.”

Calvin Borel met Elizabeth II in the receiving line at the state dinner that night. Posing for an official photograph between the monarch and the first lady, Borel did what Laura Bush called “the sweetest thing” as he wrapped his arms around both women. By now infringements of protocol such as touching the Queen were becoming almost routine. In her toast, the Queen spoke fondly of the “vital wartime alliance” forged by Winston Churchill that had carried forward across the decades as a “partnership always to be reckoned with.”

The following night she hosted a dinner in honor of the Bushes at the British embassy. All day her advisers had been urging her to include in her toast a lighthearted reference to the president’s verbal stumble the previous day until she finally relented. “I wondered whether I should start this toast by saying, ‘When I was here in 1776 but I don’t think I will,’ ” she said as the guests laughed knowingly. “It was the perfect retort,” recalled Bush. When the Sovereign’s Standard was lowered from the embassy flagpole at the conclusion of the evening, the Queen and Philip were whisked to Andrews Air Force Base for their flight home, he in black tie and she in her gown and tiara.

ON JUNE 27, 2007, Tony Blair resigned as prime minister under pressure from his fifty-six-year-old chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown. It was a quiet coup by the Scotsman after a decade of playing second fiddle to the charismatic prime minister. Largely because of widespread opposition to the Iraq War, Blair had become deeply unpopular, which strengthened the Labour bloc led by Brown. Blair finally yielded two months after passing the Labour Party record of ten years as prime minister.

The son of a minister in the Church of Scotland, Brown had been a scholastic prodigy, entering the University of Edinburgh at age sixteen and eventually earning a doctorate. He had a brooding manner matched by a burly and sometimes disheveled appearance, and he advanced in politics despite what Blair called “a lacuna—not the wrong instinct, but no instinct at the human, gut level. Political calculation, yes. Political feelings, no. Analytical intelligence, absolutely. Emotional intelligence, zero.” Brown’s success was fueled by his prodigious energy, formidable intellect, and intense focus. But he was an odd duck: capable of quick wit, but more often socially maladroit and programmed in his casual social interactions.

Brown was touched by tragedy as well. An accident while playing rugby as a teenager left him blind in one eye, and his vision was also impaired in the other eye. He didn’t marry until age forty-nine, and he and his wife, Sarah, lost their first child ten days after her birth in 2002. They later had two sons, one of whom was afflicted with cystic fibrosis.

Elizabeth II knew Brown from a decade of his briefings before presenting the annual budget. In his audience the previous year he had assured her that he had “some good information about how we’re trying to support the troops.” “They’re very pushed now, in so many places,” the Queen commented. When she told him that Prince Andrew had recently visited Iraq, Brown assured her the government was “doing some investment in helicopters.” “It would be good if the helicopters we bought actually could work,” she pointedly replied.

The Queen treated Brown correctly, and the prime minister was “tremendously respectful of the royal family,” said Simon Lewis, who served as Brown’s press secretary for his last year in office. “If any Palace-related issues came up, he would say, ‘Simon, make sure we’re on top of that.’ He was sensitive to the nature of the relationship and getting on smoothly.” Compared to the thoroughly urban Tony Blair, it helped that Brown came from a country background, with a home overlooking the Firth of Forth.

Brown said he relied on the Queen’s knowing “what works and what doesn’t. Sometimes you go back and change a bit of your speech.” But he especially valued her sense of humor and how “she’ll be talking about things that make both her and me laugh.” When the Queen was with friends, he sometimes was the target of that humor; her talent for mimicry and years of listening to Scottish brogue enabled her to render a spot-on imitation of her new prime minister. Brown’s visits to Balmoral, said Margaret Rhodes, “brought a certain amount of heavy weather.”

ELIZABETH AND PHILIP hit another milestone on November 20, 2007, as the first Queen and consort to celebrate sixty years of marriage. “With the absence of her mother and sister, the Duke of Edinburgh has been her emotional touchstone,” said one of the Queen’s senior advisers. When he was away, staying at Wood Farm on a shooting weekend at Sandringham, for example, he would ring her up every day. “They are not physically demonstrative, but they have a strong connection,” said another courtier. “She still lights up when he walks into the room. She becomes softer, lighter, and happier.”

Their religious bond deepened as well. Her unwavering faith was ingrained from childhood, while Philip’s meandered from the Greek Orthodox beliefs of his parents through his confirmation as an Anglican to his probing of theological and interfaith issues. “His approach is much more restless than the Queen, more focused on the intellectual side,” said George Carey. “He is searching, and he has been a bridge builder, putting faiths together. He has more time to do that, and the Queen stands back and lets him.”

Yet Elizabeth II and Philip, according to their cousin Pamela Hicks, are “not a sweet old Darby and Joan by any means. They’re both very strong characters.” One point of disagreement concerned the press. “I don’t read the tabloids,” Philip sputtered to Jeremy Paxman, the BBC’s grand inquisitor, in 2006. “I glance at one [broadsheet]. I reckon one’s enough. I can’t cope with them. But the Queen reads every bloody paper she can lay her hands on!”

After Philip took one too many spills in his competitive carriage driving, Elizabeth II put her foot down and insisted that he stop, although he continued to drive for pleasure. On other matters, she simply avoided confrontation. When her husband’s dressing room at Sandringham needed to be repainted, “on Her Majesty’s instruction we had to match the dirty paintwork so he wouldn’t know,” said Tony Parnell, for more than three decades the foreman responsible for looking after the house. “I don’t think he ever knew.”

Elizabeth II gave Philip the latitude to experiment in his supervision of her estates. At Sandringham he created a truffière, an orchard designed to produce organic truffles, in addition to breeding French partridges (“incredibly stupid birds,” he said) and growing fruits for the production of apple juice and black currant cordial. He was responsible for their private art collection, buying at shows in Edinburgh, where he had an eye for up-and-coming artists, and hanging the paintings himself in their private apartments. The Queen, however, continued to supervise the decor in their private homes. “Her taste was very modest in terms of decoration and fabrics,” recalled Tony Parnell. “It was almost replacing like for like.”

Philip frequently rode through London inconspicuously in his own Metrocab, sometimes taking the wheel himself. Once he drove his taxi to a dinner with friends at a modest flat on the edge of Belgravia belonging to Jane Westmorland, widow of the 15th Earl. “He wore a cap like a taxi driver and the detective sat in the back seat,” recalled Frolic Weymouth. “He drove around and around in the circle out front to show us how easily the cab could turn.”

When they were together in public, Philip could still cause his wife anxiety with his unpredictable comments within earshot of the press. Labour MP Chris Mullin recalled a time in 2003 when the Queen was attending the Commonwealth conference in Nigeria. After an official read a statement at the opening of the new British Council offices in Abuja, Philip huffed, “That speech contained more jargon per square inch than any I’ve heard for a long time.” He then turned to a group of women and asked if they were teachers. They replied that their job was to “empower” people. “Empower?” he boomed. “Doesn’t sound like English to me!” As Mullin recorded in his diary, “By now the Queen, noticing that trouble is brewing, has turned and is pointing vaguely over the balcony. ‘Look …’ The Duke, stopping mid-sentence, retreats instantly to her side, somewhat bemused. ‘… at the pottery.’ When they have gone, I go and look. I see no pottery.”

At the Queen’s request, the celebrations of their diamond wedding anniversary were muted and family-oriented. The couple visited Broadlands on Sunday, November 18, and spent time searching for a tree where they were photographed during their honeymoon. The Queen appeared in the same double strand of pearls and sapphire brooch ringed with diamonds that she had worn six decades earlier. For their official anniversary photograph on the grounds of the Mountbatten estate, Elizabeth II and Philip re-created a nearly identical pose—her right hand tucked into his left elbow as they smiled at each other. He looked less jaunty, but the warmth of her gaze was remarkably similar. That evening, Charles and Camilla hosted a black-tie family dinner party at Clarence House.

The next day the Queen and Philip attended a commemoration at Westminster Abbey, where Prince William’s reading from the Book of John included the line “Let us love one another because love is from God.” Judi Dench recited verse composed by poet laureate Andrew Motion that commended “a life where duty spoke in languages their tenderness could share, a life remote from ours because it asked each day, each action to be kept in view.”

The royal couple flew to Malta on the 20th for a sentimental journey to the island where they had enjoyed unencumbered happiness and a brief spell of normality as a young married couple. A month later they received a belated anniversary gift with the birth of their eighth grandchild, James Alexander Philip Theo Wessex. As they had with his older sister, Edward and Sophie decided their son would not be known as a Royal Highness, enabling both of the children to pursue a life outside the royal orbit.

THROUGHOUT THE CELEBRATIONS, Elizabeth II and Philip were keeping a secret: their twenty-three-year-old grandson, Prince Harry, a second lieutenant in the Household Cavalry regiment of the Blues and Royals, was about to be sent to Helmand Province in Afghanistan for a seven-month deployment. Since the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, Elizabeth II had received regular updates from top officials in the military and Foreign Office, so she was well aware of the treacherous combat conditions facing the British military in both places.

Her role as the head of armed forces is one of her most sacrosanct duties. With her hierarchies, rituals, traditions, and clothing created with a military-style sense of occasion, she is a soldier at heart. Members of the military are acutely aware that they are fighting for Queen and Country. “The royal family has pride and joy in the military,” said General Charles Guthrie, Baron Guthrie of Craigiebank, who was the chief of the Defence staff from 1997 to 2001. “Come hell or high water, the military is loyal to the Queen, who is their commander in chief.”

Since her days with the garrison at Windsor Castle during World War II and her brief service in uniform with the Auxiliary Territorial Service, she has taken a keen personal interest in military matters, meeting informally with the top brass over lunch and dinner as well as in audiences. She visibly relaxes in the company of soldiers, not thinking twice about walking into a battalion of a thousand men. Once she helpfully sent a commander a photograph from a magazine showing a piebald shire stallion she considered suitable for service as a drum horse for the Household Cavalry.

Her knowledge of military traditions and practices is encyclopedic, as officers serving her quickly learn. When Johnny Martin-Smith, a lieutenant on guard duty at Windsor Castle, was invited to dinner with the Queen, she turned to him and said, “Do the Welsh Guards have new uniform requirements? Are red socks allowed?” She had been looking out the window that day at a Welsh Guards soldier setting up a bandstand who had worn red instead of regulation green socks.

“The Queen has an eagle eye, possibly better than 15 eagles,” said a Palace courtier. After her annual birthday parade, she gives her critique to senior officers, sometimes asking why a soldier was standing several feet out of position or moving his fingers on his rifle. “I hope that man who cut his hand is going to be all right,” she said one year to the officer in charge. A soldier in the front row had cut himself on his bayonet and nobody else had noticed except the Queen, who had been standing at some distance. “Cut himself, ma’am?” replied the officer. “Yes,” said the Queen, “the one in the middle, the 3rd or 4th man.”

The Queen “wouldn’t read a three-volume history of Afghanistan,” said Charles Guthrie, who met with her frequently. But through her briefings by officers and meetings with soldiers returning from the front lines, along with reading her boxes and newspapers and watching reports on television, her knowledge is impressively up to date. “You could tell her what you thought,” said Guthrie. “You could be critical of government, and she would listen. She would not comment. She would not get into gossip. She would question on certain things that were topical, but it wasn’t an interrogation. It was a conversation. She absolutely understands her constitutional prerogatives and does not stray into areas that could be unconstitutional. She doesn’t try to run the army.”

When the Labour government consolidated many of the army’s historic regiments in 2006 to cut costs, she made inquiries but stayed out of the debate. “She knew we had too many regiments,” said senior Blair adviser Jonathan Powell. “She was concerned, but she was not a lobbyist pushing an agenda.” Speaking to one of the army chiefs, however, she couldn’t conceal her sadness when the venerable Black Watch was merged with five other regiments to become a battalion within the new Royal Regiment of Scotland. The Queen Mother had been colonel-in-chief of the Black Watch for sixty-five years, and three of her brothers, including one who died in battle during World War I, had served in the regiment.

The Queen fully supported the decisions by William and Harry to enter the military. “It is a traditional thing to do, a good thing to do,” explained Charles Guthrie, who discussed it with her. “It teaches a lot about leadership. It mixes up royals with different examples of society, people from poor backgrounds, which is helpful and certainly very good.” Choosing the army rather than the navy, where the princes’ father, uncle, and grandfather had served, reflected the practical reality of modern warfare and the decline of Britain’s importance as a naval power. The military gave William and Harry jobs that kept them away from the limelight—and the press.

The imposition of discipline in the context of regimental camaraderie was particularly good for Harry, whose high spirits threatened to turn him into a scapegrace. He got caught using marijuana when he was seventeen, prompting his father to march him off to visit a drug rehabilitation center and listen to recovering addicts. There were other unfortunate incidents involving the third in line to the throne—sightings of drunkenness at London clubs and at a costume party where Harry wore a swastika armband. Because of his red hair and freckles, it had long been rumored that his father was James Hewitt—despite the well-documented fact that Diana didn’t meet the cavalry officer until after Harry was born. While Diana strongly resembled her maternal grandmother, Ruth Fermoy, she scarcely looked like her father’s side of the family. Harry, however, inherited the ginger looks of the Spencers.

It was first proposed early in 2007 that Harry be posted to Iraq. He was determined to serve with his regiment, but when publicity about the prospect led to terrorist threats against him, Army Chief of Staff Sir Richard Dannatt vetoed his participation. The Queen had favored his deployment, and she helped talk Harry through his frustration. She supported his resolution to “turn to the right and carry on,” he recalled.

When the Blues and Royals regiment was called to Afghanistan later in the year, Dannatt consulted with Gordon Brown, the Prince of Wales, and the Queen. They decided to deploy Harry under an embargo reached with selected news organizations that agreed to publicize the details of his experience once he had returned safely to Britain. As with her decision to back Andrew twenty-five years earlier, the Queen didn’t hesitate. She broke the news to her grandson in December on a weekend at Windsor Castle. “I think she’s relieved that I get the chance to do what I want to do,” he said at the time. “She’s a very good person to talk to about it.”

From his arrival only days before Christmas, Harry served on the front lines at a forward operating base under regular fire from machine guns, snipers, rockets, and mortars. He called in air strikes and routinely went out on foot patrol through dangerous Taliban-held terrain. As a troop leader responsible for eleven soldiers doing reconnaissance work, he was undeniably in danger. At the same time, he was “‘mucking in’ with every other soldier, cooking his own rations, taking his turn making brews for himself and his mates, cleaning his rifle and equipment,” wrote Colonel Richard Kemp, former commander of British forces in Afghanistan.

The secret of his deployment held for ten weeks, until an Australian magazine and a German newspaper broke the blackout, and an American website, the Drudge Report, picked up the news. The Ministry of Defence withdrew Harry from Helmand, at least in part to ensure the safety of his battle group. Before leaving, the prince said, “All my wishes have come true. I managed to get the job done.” He was also grateful, he said, because “it’s very nice to be sort of a normal person for once. I think it’s about as normal as I’m going to get.”

THE FINAL MONTHS of 2007 marked the appearance of another work of fiction that captured the public imagination about the Queen. In The Uncommon Reader, Alan Bennett’s fictionalized Elizabeth II discovers a passion for reading—an opsimath, she calls herself, delighted to find a word describing a tate-blooming learner. She neglects her official chores as she breezes through an eclectic canon including Mitford, Austen, Balzac, Pepys, Byatt, McEwan, Roth, and even the memoirs of Lauren Bacall, whose life she envies for having “had a much better bite at the carrot.” The Queen confuses those she meets by asking about their reading habits, throws her courtiers and her family into a state of high alarm, and eventually decides to take up writing and redeem her life “by analysis and reflection.”

It is a thoroughly fanciful plot, given the Queen’s deep-seated sense of duty and practical turn of mind. But as in A Question of Attribution twenty years earlier, Bennett zeroes in on the Queen’s underestimated qualities and depicts a shrewd, observant, and inquisitive character whose sly wit (“Oh do get on!” she mutters while reading Henry James at teatime) is a believable facsimile of Elizabeth II’s tart asides.

The book was a runaway bestseller in Britain and the United States, propelled by word of mouth and rave reviews. After The Queen, wrote Jeremy McCarter in The New York Times Book Review, the book “offered yet another reason to think warmly of Her Majesty, another reminder that marble has veins.” Like the film, Bennett’s book tapped into a yearning for Elizabeth II to break out of the royal cocoon, and to show some of her repressed mischief. The most touching aspect of Bennett’s depiction is his character’s discovery of egalitarian anonymity when immersed in a book: “It was shared, it was common.… Between these covers she could go unrecognized.”

The real Queen keeps her views of literature well guarded, but she does take a special interest in the annual Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, a competition for authors around the world. She reads the winning novels for pleasure intermingled with obligation. Most of them are historical fiction, and in recent years she has enjoyed The Secret River by Kate Grenville, on the early colonization of Australia; Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones, about Papua New Guinea; and The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill, on the slave trade with Canada. Each summer she invites the winner to Buckingham Palace for an audience. “It’s very informal,” said Mark Collins, director of the Commonwealth Foundation, who accompanies the authors. “It’s upstairs in her private apartments, and we’re knee-deep in corgis running around.” For twenty minutes she conducts an earnest discussion touching on the writer’s roots, the source of inspiration, and how the book developed. “She asks how the locations came to be selected, and the characters, and any reflections on the country that the author might have,” recalled Collins. “The discussion rattles along tidily.”

ELIZABETH II IS not the sort to brood about mortality, but in the early years of her ninth decade she almost seemed to be making her way down a sort of royal bucket list, checking off things she hadn’t done before, and places she hadn’t seen. In June 2008, she attended her first luncheon at Pratt’s, an exclusive men’s club in St. James’s owned by the Duke of Devonshire. At the invitation of a conservation group called the Shikar Club, she joined her husband and ten other members for drinks in front of a large fireplace, followed by a robust meal of smoked salmon, lamb cutlet, and treacle tart. The following July she watched the annual Swan Upping, a ritual dating to the twelfth century when the swans on the Thames (which belong to the sovereign) are officially counted. She even started taking a regular commuter train to and from King’s Lynn in Norfolk for her annual winter break at Sandringham. She didn’t sit with the regular passengers, however; for security reasons, she and her small party took over a first-class compartment.

For shooting, stalking, and fishing weekends at Sandringham and Balmoral she began including more guests a generation younger. “We have seen less of them,” said a woman who had been a regular guest of Elizabeth II and Philip since the 1950s. “They don’t just see the old fogies.”

The children of her longtime friends found that she responded readily when they invited her to informal dinners, where she took time to chat with their own teenage children, asking them questions and listening intently. When one of her bridesmaids, Lady Elizabeth Longman (known to her friends as “Smith”), turned eighty, Elizabeth II went to a cocktail party in her honor in a small flat. While a female protection officer waited in the car, a guest escorted the Queen up in a rickety elevator. She stayed for more than an hour and spent a full fifteen minutes talking to Smith’s grandson, Freddy Van Zevenbergen, a designer who built scale models of grand houses.

For the first time in nine years, the Queen had a winner on the final day of Royal Ascot in June 2008. Her two-year-old colt Free Agent was running behind what John Warren called “a wall” of ten other horses with only three furlongs to go in the Chesham Stakes. But Free Agent, ridden by Richard Hughes, broke through and won by two and a quarter lengths. “I’ve done it!” the Queen shouted. Seated between Warren and her husband, she jumped up and punched the air with her fist—an unusual public display captured by BBC cameras for the evening newscasts. “It was a moment of real joy,” said John Warren. Afterward, “she raced to the paddock like she was 20,” said her fifty-two-year-old bloodstock adviser. “We were struggling to keep up with her. The jockey was trying to explain what had happened but all the Queen wanted to do was touch her horse.”

Earlier in the week at Ascot, Helen Mirren was in attendance to present a trophy, and the Queen asked her cinematic alter ego to the royal box for tea. “I wouldn’t have been invited to tea if she had hated the film,” said Mirren. “I was very touched to be invited.” The Queen said, “Hello, it’s lovely to meet you,” followed by some “horsey chat.” It was only the second time Elizabeth II had met an actress who played her. Some years earlier she had encountered Prunella Scales, who portrayed the Queen in A Question of Attribution. When Scales bowed to Elizabeth II in a receiving line, the Queen said, “I expect you think I should be doing that to you.”

ELIZABETH II’S ELDEST son celebrated his sixtieth birthday in November 2008, making him the oldest Prince of Wales in history, passing King Edward VII, who was fifty-nine when he succeeded Queen Victoria on her death in 1901. Elizabeth II hosted a black-tie reception, orchestral concert, and dinner in Charles’s honor at Buckingham Palace on the eve of his birthday on the 14th. More noteworthy was the visit she and Philip made a day earlier to the headquarters of his signature charity, the Prince’s Trust, which since its founding in 1976 had helped more than a half million disadvantaged youths learn skills and find jobs.

Throughout his life Charles has craved the approval of his parents, and the Queen’s remarks that day represented a rare public expression of support for his philanthropic work with his twenty charities and as patron or president of 350 other organizations. “For Prince Philip and me there can be no greater pleasure or comfort than to know that into his care are safely entrusted the guiding principles of public service and duty to others,” the Queen said.

Charles overtook his sister, Anne’s, record as “hardest working royal,” with 560 official engagements in 2008. (She came close with 534.) His mother logged 417 visits in the U.K. and overseas that year—down only slightly from 440 in 2007. At age eighty-two—seventeen years past Britain’s mandatory retirement age at the time—she had no intention of slowing down. The previous December she had become the oldest-ever monarch when she passed Queen Victoria, who lived eighty-one years and 243 days.

She continued to carry out her duties as she had since her accession, serving as head of state—representing her government officially at home and abroad—as well as head of nation, connecting with people to reward their achievements and remain in touch. But while in the early years of her reign she presided over twenty-six investitures a year, that number was gradually pared to fifteen, with Prince Charles and Princess Anne splitting the rest.

“All her programs are done with great cleverness,” said Malcolm Ross, her former comptroller. “They have reduced the pace for her without it showing.” But whenever her advisers try to sneak something too obvious into her schedule to give her a rest, “she instantly spots it and asks why she is not doing more,” said a source close to the Palace household. “She doesn’t miss anything.”

Robin Janvrin, the Queen’s private secretary and leading advocate of modernizing, retired in 2007. Janvrin was replaced by forty-six-year-old Christopher Geidt, a like-minded veteran of the Foreign Office with degrees from King’s College London and Cambridge University. He made a smooth transition, setting the tone with brisk efficiency and easy humor.

The all-important Palace communications apparatus was now run by two women in their late thirties, both mothers of small children. Samantha Cohen, communications and press secretary to the Queen, had written for regional newspapers in her native Australia, and before joining the royal household had been head of communications for National Grid, the international electricity and gas company. Deputy press secretary Ailsa Anderson came out of regional newspapers in Essex to work in the civil service. She served as press officer for Conservative Nicholas Soames at the Ministry of Defence and for Labour politician Margaret Beckett when she served in Tony Blair’s cabinet. Bright, skillful, straightforward, and tough, Cohen and Anderson managed to protect the Queen’s private life while boldly projecting her image as a symbol of modernity.

Elizabeth II began responding more quickly to crises, and showing more emotion in public. She had her portrait done as a hologram. She chatted comfortably with pop singer Lady Gaga without flinching at the performer’s shiny red latex outfit, and cheerfully welcomed to Buckingham Palace fashion designer Zandra Rhodes, who sported a pink wig, and photographer David Bailey, who wore ratty jeans. When the world financial meltdown hit in the fall of 2008, the Queen made a trip to the London School of Economics. After listening to a presentation on the origin of the credit crisis, she asked the one essential question: “Why did no one see it coming?” “The general feeling is she is more approachable, human, empathetic, and in touch,” said a Palace official.

Although the Queen had received her first computer twenty-five years earlier from Ronald Reagan, she had lagged behind her husband in adapting to technology. Philip began writing letters on a computer in the 1980s and became an avid user of email and the Internet, especially while researching his speeches. Elizabeth II eventually took up cell phones to send text messages to her grandchildren, and computers to keep track of her horses. At the suggestion of Prince Andrew, she acquired an iPod in 2005. While firmly committed to paper and pen, she began exchanging emails with family members. Ten years after launching the royal website in 1997, the Queen got her own channel on YouTube in December 2007, with a million hits in the first week.

There was no better indicator of her embrace of the new than her visit to the London headquarters of Google in the fall of 2008. The dynamic young company honored Elizabeth II by incorporating her image and a crown into the “Google doodle” logo on its U.K. home page on the day of her visit. The Queen and Philip (“a great googler,” said one of the Queen’s senior advisers. “He is always googling, and sharing it with the Queen”) spent more than an hour in the company’s offices, meeting a predominantly youthful and casually dressed group of employees. “Just come back from jogging?” Philip inquired when he met marketing executive Matthew Trewhella, who was wearing a hooded top, chinos, and sneakers.

During her visit, Elizabeth II uploaded onto her Royal Channel a video of a reception at Buckingham Palace in 1968 for Olympic athletes, delicately guiding the mouse with her black-gloved right hand. When she and Philip were shown the famous “laughing baby” on YouTube, they caught the contagion and started to giggle. “Lovely little thing isn’t it?” she said to her husband. “Amazing a child would laugh like that.”

EVEN AS SHE kept her focus on the here and now, in various ways, publicly and privately, the Queen honored her late mother, whose memory she kept close. During a shooting weekend at Sandringham in January 2009, she lost an important link with the death of Emma, the last of the Queen Mother’s corgis. A visibly saddened Queen went around the room before dinner and gave the news to each of the guests as Philip tried to console her.

The following month the family and a throng of friends were out in force on the terrace below Carlton House to unveil a bronze statue more than nine feet tall of a faintly smiling Queen Mother in her Garter robes. She was portrayed at age fifty-one because the memorial stood below a bronze statue of George VI, also in Garter attire, at age fifty-six, the year of his death. “At long last my grandparents are reunited,” said Prince Charles after his mother had pulled a cord to remove the blue satin cover. The £2 million memorial, paid for by the sale of coins commemorating Elizabeth II’s eightieth birthday, also featured two eleven-foot-long bronze friezes that captured the Queen Mother’s spirit by depicting her comforting homeless families in London’s East End during World War II, being applauded with one of her winning racehorses, and sitting with two of her corgis in the garden at the Castle of Mey.

Several months later the Queen turned up as a surprise guest at a fund-raising reception for the Castle of Mey Foundation. The Queen Mother’s favorite residence had been opened to the public in August 2002, and private funds helped maintain both castle and gardens. Elizabeth II was only scheduled to make a brief appearance at the Goring Hotel near Buckingham Palace. Instead, she spent ninety minutes circulating through the room and conversing with patrons and potential donors. One British businessman was so taken by his encounter that he later wrote a £20,000 check to the foundation.

AN ADVANTAGE ELIZABETH II has had over all her prime ministers is her vast knowledge of the United Kingdom that she gathers in visits called “awaydays” to cities as well as tiny hamlets. “She knows every inch of this country in a way that no one else does,” said Charles Powell, who came to appreciate the Queen’s expertise when he worked as private secretary to Margaret Thatcher and John Major. “She spends so much time meeting people that she has an understanding of what other people’s lives are like in Britain. I think she understands what the normal human condition is.”

In March 2009 she visited Kingston upon Hull in East Yorkshire—described by The Times as one of the country’s “few dogged bastions of republicanism”—for the first time in ten years. Before her maiden visit in 1957, one of her advisers wrote a speech that began “I am very pleased to be in Kingston today.” The Queen decisively crossed out the “very” and said, “I will be pleased to be in Kingston, but I will not be very pleased.” Whether the adverb applied fifty-two years later she did not say, but she was eager to assess the impact of the economic downturn on the once thriving shipping center, which had also suffered extensive flood damage from torrential rains two years earlier.

Palace advisers worked with Susan Cunliffe-Lister, the lord lieutenant of East Yorkshire, and other local officials to organize the itinerary for the four-hour awayday. When the Queen was younger, she would pack in as many as eight different stops, but now she did a maximum of four, ending with lunch. To help prepare the Queen, Cunliffe-Lister sent seventy pages of briefings: rundowns on the people she would meet, descriptions of the places she would see, and menus and seating plans for a luncheon in the Guildhall. Palace officials produced a seventeen-page single-spaced schedule that included every step the Queen would take.

To minimize disruption to the rail system and ensure an on-time arrival, Elizabeth II and Philip spent the night before their visit on the Royal Train near Hull. The shiny maroon train, a staple of royal travel since Queen Victoria ordered the first version in 1842, is endearingly old-fashioned, its functional decor dating from the 1970s. The Queen and Philip each have a separate carriage—“saloon” in royal parlance—divided into a bedroom, bathroom and sitting room with a desk and small dining table. The furniture is blond wood, the floors are covered in plain wall-to-wall carpet, and the plastic walls are adorned with Scottish landscapes and Victorian prints of rail journeys.

When the train pulled into the Hull station at 10:20 A.M. on March 3, the Queen and Philip were greeted on the platform by the predictable lineup of dignitaries that the Palace calls the “chain gang,” so named for the ceremonial chains and other regalia worn by the lord mayor, the high sheriff, and beadles in their robes, knee breeches, buckled shoes, and plumed hats. The royal retinue was small—a lady-in-waiting, an assistant private secretary, an equerry, and several personal protection officers—but there was a large local security contingent.

At the Queen’s request, she met more ordinary people than luminaries. Waiting nearby was the royal Bentley (transported the previous day in a truck) with the hood ornament of St. George slaying the dragon and the distinctive shield bearing the Queen’s arms attached to the roof. After a five-minute walkabout of approximately twenty paces along the barriers outside the station, Elizabeth II was driven to the Queen’s Center for Oncology and Haematology, where she spent nearly an hour talking to patients, doctors, and nurses.

Phil Brown, the forty-nine-year-old manager of the Hull City football team, sat next to the Queen at the Guildhall luncheon. “She has an amazing ability to scan right across the classes, to come to my level and to go back to being regal,” he said. She talked across the table to a “lollipop lady” (a school crossing guard), an ambulance driver, and an “environmental community volunteer.” Maria Raper, the crossing guard, was transfixed not only by the sight of the Queen applying lipstick after polishing off her Tian of Triple Chocolate Mousse, but by the way she “was picking at her bread roll the whole time. She opened it and picked little bits off, and at the end of the meal there was her bread plate with a collection of small bits of bread.” Throughout the day, Elizabeth II smiled frequently and moved unhurriedly, mindful of Martin Charteris’s edict to “spread a carpet of happiness.” The next morning’s Hull Daily Mail rewarded her efforts with the banner headline “SHE’S A ROYAL TONIC.”

SEVERAL WEEKS LATER she shifted her focus to the international sphere for a state visit by Felipe Calderón, the president of Mexico. After hosting ninety-six state visits, the Queen was no less attentive to the minutiae of ceremony and protocol. Every place setting for the state banquet in the ballroom was precisely measured, and all the fruit on the table was polished to a high gloss.

In the middle of the Mexican visit, the Queen and Prince Philip hosted a reception at Buckingham Palace for twenty world leaders attending the G-20 summit. Before the reception began they had their first meeting with the new American president, forty-seven-year-old Barack Obama, and his forty-five-year-old wife, Michelle.

Although Gordon Brown had spent many summers vacationing in Provincetown on Cape Cod, his relationship with the United States was not as close as that of Blair, who had forged personal ties with both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Obama had also shown a coolness toward the “special relationship.” Shortly after taking office, he returned the bronze bust of Winston Churchill that George W. Bush had proudly displayed for seven years. The British government had lent the bust after 9/11 “as a signal of the strong transatlantic relationship,” and Obama decided to discontinue the loan.

But the forty-fourth American president and his wife had an air of expectancy when they arrived at the private Garden Entrance of the Palace. The first lady even confided to a courtier that she was nervous about meeting the sovereign. The Queen arranged to have her American lady-in-waiting, Ginny Airlie, greet the couple before Master of the Household David Walker escorted them upstairs to the private apartments, where they had twenty minutes of congenial small talk with Elizabeth II and Philip. The royal couple presented their standard gift—a signed framed photograph—and the Obamas gave the Queen a video iPod loaded with forty classic show tunes, photographs, and footage of her 2007 and 1957 visits to the United States, as well as the audio of the president’s speech to the 2004 Democratic National Convention and his inaugural address, along with a selection of inaugural pictures.

Elizabeth II and Prince Philip greeted the rest of the heads of state visiting for the G-20 summit in a receiving line before they made their way into the Picture Gallery, with its extraordinary array of paintings, including works by Canaletto, Rubens, Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Holbein. “The Queen knows when she enters the room she is the most compelling head of state in the room,” former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney once observed. “She is number one even though her country is not number one.”

The atmosphere was electric with concentrated power as the Queen informally circulated among the world leaders, with no need for introductions by her equerries and ladies-in-waiting, who lingered nearby mainly to engage guests as they waited for a chance to speak. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was working the room like a political candidate, stopping at one point to talk to French president Nicolas Sarkozy over the Queen—a maneuver that Elizabeth II doubtless thought “frightfully funny,” said one of her ladies-in-waiting.

With the American president standing six foot one and his wife nearly as tall, the Obamas towered over nearly everyone. As Michelle Obama and the Queen were talking, they turned toward lady-in-waiting Susan Hussey to remark on their disparity in size. The first lady wrapped her arm around the Queen’s back, and Elizabeth II responded in kind, lightly placing her arm around Michelle’s waist. After ten seconds, the Queen dropped her arm to her side, but the first lady kept her hand in place and even gave the sovereign’s shoulder a reassuring rub.

“It happened spontaneously,” said Peter Wilkinson, the Queen’s videographer, who recorded the moment. “The Queen and Michelle were lifting up their heels to compare the size. The Queen came up to Michelle’s shoulder, and when they put their arms around each other, the Queen jokingly looked skyward. Sue Hussey was laughing. They sort of did it together as they compared their heights.”

The newspapers grabbed Wilkinson’s footage off the television screens and made a fuss about an “unthinkable” breach of protocol by the first lady. But after the Queen’s encounters in the United States and Australia in recent years, not to mention her hugs and kisses with close friends, she was more relaxed about gestures of familiarity. Palace officials hastened to say there was neither an offense nor a faux pas in what a spokeswoman described as a “mutual and spontaneous display of affection and appreciation.” “You can’t analyze it,” said a courtier. “It just happened. We’d never seen it before, but the Queen was happy, the event was going so well, which is why there was a spontaneous happy expression.”

* * *

THE FOLLOWING NOVEMBER Elizabeth II was off on her big foreign tour of the year—two days in Bermuda, followed by a three-day state visit in Trinidad and Tobago combined with the biennial meeting of Commonwealth leaders. They were sent on their way, according to custom, at Heathrow Airport by the Queen’s Lord Chamberlain, William Peel, the 3rd Earl, a ritual that invariably prompted Philip to exclaim, “Mind the shop!”

At age eighty-three, the Queen studied her briefs as conscientiously as ever—biographical summaries of all the people she would meet (with difficult pronunciations phonetically spelled out) along with Foreign Office guidance on questions that the foreign leaders might raise. Her itineraries, prepared by the host countries and Palace officials, had been approved in detail by the Queen, with time splits down to the half minute. Every conceivable scrap of information was included in a four-by-six-inch spiral-bound blue book called the “Mini”—names, logistics, security details, dress requirements, and the number of paces from point to point (13+7 signifying 13 steps, a pause, then 7 steps), rehearsed repeatedly by her staff during a series of reconnaissance trips.

The visit to Bermuda was to mark the four hundredth anniversary of the island’s settlement by English voyagers marooned after a shipwreck. It was fifty-six years to the day since she had first set foot on her distant territory in the Atlantic as she began her coronation tour.

After her eight-hour flight with no time to nap, she arrived in mid-afternoon to a ceremonial welcome led by Bermuda’s governor, Sir Richard Gozney (resplendent in a white uniform and white cocked hat decorated with swan feathers) and Premier Ewart Brown, followed by a walkabout and a ninety-minute cocktail party with 150 prominent Bermudians at Government House, the governor’s Italianate home on the island’s north shore.

The Queen was a smiling icon moving through the crowd at the reception, careful not to engage too much. For all her expansiveness in private, her remarks in these settings seemed to escape like wisps of vapor. After decades in the public eye, she had become like a Rorschach test, saying little and allowing others to superimpose their impressions. At a small dinner afterward, Richard Gozney noted that she showed “no visible signs of flagging. She is clearly a master of pacing herself. You don’t see it, but she organizes her own energies and output accordingly.” She had a four-hour stretch of downtime in the next day’s twelve-hour schedule, which she used to do her boxes in her three-room suite.

As she crisscrossed the island, she walked whenever she could, was driven through the streets of Hamilton in an open landau, and slowed her motorcade whenever possible—knowing, as she had said decades earlier, that “I have to be seen to be believed.” An estimated twenty thousand people lined the roads, in some places four deep, far exceeding the turnout on her previous visit in 1994. The enthusiastic support for the monarch was seen as a rebuke to Ewart Brown’s advocacy of independence for the island, which had been rejected repeatedly in public opinion polls.

For her four-hour flight to Trinidad the next day, more than sixty people were on board the British Airways 777, including two private secretaries, her equerry, two ladies-in-waiting, a physician, her personal assistant, a hairdresser, footmen, maids, administrative support personnel, and security officers, along with fifteen members of the broadcast and print media, all spread out in an aircraft that usually accommodates 230.

The royal couple had First Class to themselves, members of the household occupied Business Class, and press and security men occupied Economy. The premium Economy section, with all the center seats removed, held a pile of securely strapped royal luggage overseen by Matthew King, the Traveling Yeoman. The Queen brought thirteen outfits, along with four spare dresses, two diamond tiaras, an array of brooches, necklaces, earrings, and bracelets. In years past, when the royal party traveled on Britannia, the entourage was much larger, with several chefs and a large military contingent, and the household brought abundant quantities of food, wine, and spirits, as well as linen, china, flatware, and such equipment as the Queen’s monogrammed electric kettle for tea. Since the decommissioning of the royal yacht, the Queen relied on the host country to meet most of those needs. In Port of Spain, Trinidad, the Queen and her household took over the entire twelve-story Carlton Savannah hotel.

Elizabeth II was back in her element in the Caribbean. Trinidad and Tobago had obtained independence in 1962 and had voted to become a republic in 1976, but the country remained in the Commonwealth and kept strong financial and cultural ties with Britain, along with an enduring affection for the Queen. She showed her respect during the state dinner on the first night by wearing an Angela Kelly–designed “emblem dress” embroidered with images of the country’s national birds, the scarlet ibis and the cocrico, and the national flower, the wild poinsettia.

She opened the Commonwealth conference the next day by attending an elaborate ceremony in the country’s performing arts center, where she gave a five-minute speech reminding the group that they should work together on environmental problems, especially by helping smaller and more vulnerable countries. “Every word she says is listened to carefully,” said Kamalesh Sharma, an Indian diplomat who was serving as the Commonwealth’s secretary-general.

“The Commonwealth is very much her legacy,” said Brian Mulroney. “For her it is a major achievement and platform.” Without the Queen’s leadership and example, “many of us would have left,” said Kenneth Kaunda, the former president of Zambia. Lacking executive power, she had nevertheless learned to use her role to exert influence and to work quietly behind the scenes to defuse crises. Through her own sources of information, she came to know more about the issues and concerns of Commonwealth countries, particularly in Africa, than her government’s top officials. She developed better relationships with Commonwealth leaders, even the Marxists, than her prime ministers. She could discuss grazing rights in Somalia, or a particular leader’s fishing habits and favorite hymns. Prince Philip said she became the “Commonwealth psychotherapist.”

While in the past she would have twenty-minute audiences with every head of government, in Trinidad she limited herself to a private reception with the fifteen leaders who had taken office since the previous Commonwealth conference two years earlier. At her dinner that evening for all the leaders at the Hyatt Hotel—where each place was set with silver gilt Commonwealth goblets sent over from London the previous week and stored in a vault at the Central Bank in Port of Spain—Gordon Brown was just one among many, a diffident presence at the end of the receiving line.

All the events on the Queen’s tour were stage-managed by press secretary Samantha Cohen. She helped set up photographers’ shots, mindful of vantage points and background colors, and worked with reporters on human interest angles that would appeal to their editors. Unlike the Queen Mother, Elizabeth II “doesn’t look at photographers,” said Robin Nunn, a longtime photographer of the royal family. “Over time you know that she’ll look in a certain direction, so you can catch her.”

Elizabeth II was interested in seeing as much Caribbean culture as possible, so Eric Jenkinson, the British high commissioner in Port of Spain, organized a series of musical performances, followed by a walkabout among masses of children costumed for Carnival. The Queen seemed unperturbed by the frenzy, the noise, and the heat as a scrum of still and video photographers rushed close, little girls dressed as butterflies and hummingbirds twirled and swayed to the rhythms of drums and steel pans, and adults scrambled to catch the scene on their camera phones. Nearly a dozen protection officers formed a cordon by placing themselves nearby, while Samantha Cohen kept her arms on photographer Tim Rooke’s waist as she guided him along. Videographer Peter Wilkinson worked intently but never closer than five feet away, filming for the monarchy’s website as well as a private DVD so the Queen could recall events and see people she missed.

Her final engagement—her fifth evening out—was a garden party for sixty-five worthies at the peach stucco residence of the British high commissioner on a hilltop overlooking Port of Spain. Although she had been going nearly nonstop since mid-morning, she seemed remarkably fresh and no less disciplined as she talked to seven groups arranged by themes such as sport, environment, and culture. The schedule called for 4.5 minutes per group, but Elizabeth II and Philip spent more than the allotted time, somehow managing to cross paths exactly in the middle of the terrace.

With each encounter, the Queen leaned forward, offering a smile and pertinent comment. One young man from Kenya cheekily asked for her favorite song on the iPod given to her by Barack Obama the previous March. “I don’t have time to use it much!” she replied, escaping the query without giving offense. It was a hot night, and the faces of several Palace officials were dripping sweat, but as usual the Queen’s maquillage showed no hint of moisture.

Pausing briefly inside with Jenkinson and his wife, Maire, the Queen had a soft drink and prepared for her long flight home. The royal couple walked into the night and climbed into their car, which remained illuminated as they were driven away while waving to the guests lining the driveway. “That was a seamless beautiful moment,” said one of the security men.

Elizabeth II and her entourage landed on Sunday morning at Heathrow, where they were greeted by Willie Peel, the Lord Chamberlain. After only two days off, she was back on a full work schedule, with an investiture, visits to Wellington College and the Ashmolean Museum, and a dinner party for twenty-five at Windsor Castle. “I sometimes think her advisers don’t realize she is 83 years old,” said her cousin Margaret Rhodes. “But maybe she doesn’t want them to slow her down.”