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The all new 50 Books Challenge!
Title: Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch by Sally Bedell Smith
Details: Copyright 2012, Random House
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): " "A compelling, deeply human portrait of the remarkable Elizabeth II. This is a biography not to be missed." -- LYNNE OLSON
From the moment of her ascension to the throne in 1952 at the age of twenty-five, Queen Elizabeth II was the object of unparalleled scrutiny. But through the fog of glamour and gossip, how well did we really know the world’s most famous monarch? Drawing on numerous interviews and never-before-revealed documents, acclaimed biographer Sally Bedell Smith pulls back the curtain to show in intimate detail the public and private lives of Queen Elizabeth II, who led her country and Commonwealth through the wars and upheavals of the last twentieth and twenty-first centuries with unparalleled composure, intelligence, and grace.
In Elizabeth the Queen, we meet the young girl who suddenly becomes “heiress presumptive” when her uncle abdicates the throne. We meet the thirteen-year-old Lilibet as she falls in love with a young navy cadet named Philip and becomes determined to marry him, even though her parents prefer wealthier English aristocrats. We see the teenage Lilibet repairing army trucks during World War II and standing with Winston Churchill on the balcony of Buckingham Palace on V-E Day. We see the young Queen struggling to balance the demands of her job with her role as the mother of two young children. Sally Bedell Smith brings us inside the palace doors and into the Queen’s daily routines— the “red boxes” of documents she reviewed each day, the weekly meetings she had with twelve prime ministers, her physically demanding tours abroad, and the constant scrutiny of the press—as well as her personal relationships: with her husband, Prince Philip, the love of her life; her children and their often-disastrous marriages; her grandchildren and friends.
Compulsively readable and scrupulously researched, Elizabeth the Queen is a close-up view of a woman we've known only from a distance, illuminating the lively personality, sense of humor, and canny intelligence with which she meets the most demanding work and family obligations. It is also a fascinating window into life at the center of the last great monarchy."
Why I Wanted to Read It: I read a trashy but quite entertaining book about the British Royal Family and was left interested in this ripe subject.
How I Liked It:
Like another, very different read from 2023, this book hit me hard with some questions about the author as to how it pertained to the book. What does the life of Elizabeth the II have to do with the mysterious disappearance of a nursing student in New England in 2004? In this case, it's a question about the author's motives, which we'll see.
But first, a look at Queen Elizabeth. Published a decade before her death, and a decade that saw some pretty tumultuous overturn in the British Royal Family (the tide turning against Prince Andrew, Brexit, Prince Harry's marriage to Meagan Markle and subsequent separation from the family, the death of Prince Phillip), the book chronicles the long life of the Queen up until that point, touching upon her upbringing during the War and the shocking abdication, to her ascension as a young Queen after the untimely death of her father, to her choice of duty over family, to the shifting perception of the Royal Family in recent decades, with not an inconsiderable amount dedicated to the late Princess Diana and her impact to the Queen moving into the new century.
First, this isn't just a hagiography. This is a straight-up, drooling, sycophantic hagiography, written when the Queen was still alive. I've read countless biographies throughout my life and this has to be one of the most absurdly, ridiculously flattering fawning I've ever read.
The Queen is pretty much godlike, perfect in every tier, and anything less is just misinformation. The late Princess of Wales is so evil, so pernicious that she's practically a Disney villain, scheming and plotting to take down her mother-in-law pretty much even before she was born. The author takes pains to also give a similar shine to people that the Queen would want to look good, like her cousin and husband Prince Philip, her Heir then-Prince Charles, and of course, the Heir to the Heir, Prince William. But of course, the ultimate shine belongs to Her Majesty.
What is the point exactly of this book? The author clearly wanted to be the official Royal biographer, and this was clearly her bid. The audience for this book is not so much those interested, for all the author claims to correct the massively popular 2006 film The Queen in a tedious and blowhard fashion, but the Queen herself and her handlers. And it makes for an extraordinarily dull book.
While the author's sycophancy easily veers into camp at times and certainly unintentional humor, she's playing pretty recklessly with some truly serious subjects and she's doing so for her own personal gain to curry favor with the Queen. The fact the author is an American living in the 21st century only adds to the somewhat pathetic, grasping nature of the whole book.
Does it matter to know an author's motives? Yes and no. Certainly knowing the author is fine with airbrushing the misdeeds of extremely wealthy and powerful people so long as it does what she wants it to do for her career is certainly something I'd like to know. But honestly, the book is so dull all around, even if the author was simply setting out to explore the life of one of the most notable women of the 20th century, this would be a massive disservice.
Regardless of the author's motives (which are bad), this book is a skip and there are far better sources of both entertainment and education about the British Royal Family, particularly one of its most all-time influential members.
Notable:
What do I mean by "a straight-up, drooling, sycophantic hagiography"? Permit me to demonstrate.
A singular and internationally famous figure, Elizabeth II is the world’s longest-serving leader— seemingly as familiar, predictable, and unchanging as she is dutiful. (pg xii)
With her good health and her determination to keep fit, the Queen could continue to carry out her duties effectively for a decade or more, leaving the prospect of a short reign for Prince Charles, the next in line, who will turn sixty-four in 2012 during his mother’s Diamond Jubilee celebrating her sixty years on the throne. (pg xix)
The crowds everywhere were enormous and enthusiastic. Masses of welcoming boats jammed Sydney’s harbor, and by one count, three quarters of Australia’s population came out to see the Queen. At age twenty-seven she was hailed as the “world’s sweetheart.” But the royal couple refused to let their celebrity go to their heads. “The level of adulation, you wouldn’t believe it,” Prince Philip recalled. “It could have been
corroding. It would have been very easy to play to the gallery, but I took a conscious decision not to do that.
Safer not to be too popular. You can’t fall too far.” The Queen Mother reinforced this instinct to separate their public and private personae. “How moving & humble making,” she wrote her daughter in early March 1954, “that one can be the vehicle through which this love for country can be expressed. Don’t you feel that?” (pgs 102 and 103)
Nauseous yet? There's so much more to come!
The last leg of the tour brought the royal couple back to exotic locales, with stops in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), the Cocos Islands in the Indian Ocean, Uganda, and Libya. The Queen wore her coronation dress to open the Ceylonese parliament in an outdoor pavilion. As she sat in the sun on the throne for an hour, her bejeweled dress heated up and she nearly roasted, but she showed no sign of discomfort. Her attendants noticed that
even in the hottest temperatures the Queen scarcely perspired— a phenomenon still evident into her eighties. On a visit to Ground Zero in New York City in July 2010, she spent nearly a half hour in record-shattering 103-degree heat greeting families of those who had lost their lives on 9/11. “We were all pouring sweat,” said Debbie Palmer, the widow of a firefighter. “She didn’t have a bead of sweat on her. I thought that is what it must be like to be royal.” But Pamela Mountbatten, who witnessed the Queen’s uncanny cool nearly six decades earlier, said, “There are certain people whose skin runs water, but she doesn’t. That means she can’t get relief, so she suffers twice as much from the heat. She says no perspiration makes it much worse. It is very convenient because it looks wonderful, but at a cost.” (pgs 105 and 106)
SHE IS SO GODLIKE SHE DOESN'T EVEN SWEAT!
The Queen and her family arrived at the Isle of Wight, where Churchill joined them on board Britannia for a sail into London up the Thames. “One saw this dirty commercial river as one came up,” the Queen recalled. Yet Churchill “was describing it as the silver thread which runs through the history of Britain.” Her prime minister, she observed, saw things “in a very romantic and glittering way; perhaps one was looking at it in a rather too mundane way.” Stilted though she sounded, her oft-mocked use of “one” was her unassuming way to avoid the more self-referential word “I.” (pg 107)
She's so mocked, just for a pretentious way of speaking! Also, I'd need to hear that the motives were avoiding self-referential qualities and not pretty standard (pretentious) education of her class and background.
The Queen took several noteworthy steps to shrink the traditional distance from her subjects. During a trip to Nigeria in February, she visited the Oji River Leper Settlement at a time when victims of leprosy were considered outcasts. Her “qualities of grace and compassion,” wrote British journalist Barbara Ward, “shine through the spectacle of a young queen shaking hands with cured Nigerian lepers to reassure timid villagers who do not believe in the cure.” The gesture was every bit as groundbreaking as Princess Diana’s
handshake in 1987 with an AIDS patient at a time of public fear about catching the disease through touch.
(pg 113)
SHE'S JUST AS GOOD AS DIANA EVEN BEFORE DIANA WAS BORN!
While the Queen certainly loved her children, she had fallen into professional habits that kept her apart from them much of the time. They benefited from nurturing nannies— for Charles in particular, Mabel Anderson was a “haven of security”— and a doting grandmother. But because of her dogged devotion to duty, amplified by her natural inhibitions and aversion to confrontation, Elizabeth II had missed out on many maternal
challenges as well as satisfactions. “She let things go,” said Gay Charteris. “She did have work every day. It
was easier to go back to that than children having tantrums. She always had the excuse of the red boxes.” An iconic 1957 photograph taken by Princess Margaret’s future husband, Antony Armstrong-Jones, inadvertently crystallized the distance between the royal parents and their children. It shows Elizabeth II and Philip leaning on a stone bridge in the gardens of Buckingham Palace, gazing with admiration at Anne and Charles sitting on a rock below, reading a book. (pgs 124 and 125)
She wasn't a negligent parent, she just cared too much about her job at the expense of her children, one of whom is to replace her in her job.
She was never interested in jumping, and she knew how to avoid danger. But her prudence has always excluded wearing a hard hat while riding, even in her younger days when tearing down the racecourse with her sister and her daughter, her head scarf flying in the wind during the family’s private morning race each year on Gold Cup Day during Royal Ascot. Jean Carnarvon recalled that her husband “used to be bananas about it. He would talk to her about it. She wasn’t going to do it.” Once when Ian Balding was hacking with her in Windsor Home Park, he took her to task. “I really think it is ridiculous that you above all others do not wear a crash helmet,” he said. Replied the Queen, “I never have, and you don’t have to have your hair done like I do”— an expression less of vanity than the practical need to be ready for her appointments. (pg 190)
So she's willing to do something incredibly unsafe and dangerous rather than set an example for safety?
“There is absolutely no such thing as snobbism for the Queen,” said Patricia Brabourne. “Dukes and butlers or maids are all treated with courtesy and friendship.” Much the same could be said for her attitude toward Americans. Woven through her friendships are a remarkable number of strands from Britain’s former colony. David Airlie’s wife, Virginia, is the daughter of John Barry Ryan and his wife, Nin, who were prominent in New York and Newport society. Porchey himself had an American mother, Catherine Wendell from New York,
and his wife, the former Jean Wallop, grew up in Wyoming. Her paternal grandfather, the 8th Earl of Portsmouth, had settled in the United States and married the daughter of a Kentucky judge. Jean’s first cousin is the Queen’s childhood friend Micky Nevill, the daughter of an American mother and the 9th Earl of Portsmouth. (pg 235)
It's so nice to hear there's no such thing as snobbism from someone whose literal position in life is that she was chosen by God and thus people including her own family must show her proper deference at all times.
“One of the pleasant things about the Royal Household,” David Bruce observed early in 1969, “is the admiration entertained by everyone in it for the Queen. I believe this is thoroughly deserved... The
atmosphere of cordiality in which she swims certainly impresses one as being completely genuine.” She holds her employees to high standards, treats them with respect and fairness, only rarely showing anger. (pg 229)
As with her top advisers, the Queen has always called her ladies-in-waiting and equerries by their Christian names. The staff (never servants, a word she dislikes) such as footmen, maids, and housekeepers go by their surnames, except for the Queen’s closest personal aides, her dresser and her page. (pg 232)
I'm so glad she doesn't like the word "servants". What's with "Christian names" instead of "first names"? Not everyone is "christened".
Gough Whitlam, the Labour prime minister of Australia, posed a different sort of challenge for the Queen that November. As Queen of Australia, Elizabeth II had an abiding affection for the distant realm she had visited five times since her coronation. When Whitlam was first elected in 1972, she was eager to win over the man who spoke frankly about wanting to eliminate the monarchy in his country. She invited him to stay
at Windsor Castle in April 1973 on the night of her forty-seventh birthday, along with his wife, the “too-tall”
and “ungainly” (in her own words) Margaret, nicknamed “Big Marge” by the Queen’s courtiers. The royal household pulled out the stops to entertain the Whitlams, installing them in a suite overlooking the Long Walk that stretches two and a half miles through Windsor Great Park to the giant equestrian statue of George III on Snow Hill.
After dinner, Whitlam gave the Queen a birthday present: a “deep-piled cream sheepskin rug,” which she and her sister flirtatiously sat upon after it had been spread on the floor of the drawing room. “That evening she was quite determined to catch her man,” Martin Charteris told author Graham Turner. “A lot of her sexuality has been suppressed, but that night, she used it like a weapon. She wrapped Gough Whitlam round her little finger, knocked him sideways. She sat on that rug in front of him, stroked it and said how lovely it was. It was an arrant use of sexuality. I was absolutely flabbergasted.” Whitlam later said to Charteris, “Well, if she’s like that, it’s all right by me!” (pg 267)
I'm going to throw up.
THE QUEEN HIT her fiftieth birthday on April 21, 1976. She looked enviably youthful, a combination of good genes, healthy living, and an unfussy beauty regimen. (pg 272)
YOU LEFT OUT "GODLIKE".
The Queen continued at the same pace for another two weeks in Canada, where she opened the Olympic Games in Montreal and watched her daughter compete as a member of the British equestrian team. During the cross-country event, Anne’s horse hit a fence and threw her to the ground as the Queen stared intently,
biting her nails and squinting with anxiety. Very much her mother’s daughter, Anne climbed back on and continued the race, even after suffering bruises and a mild concussion that erased her memory of the competition. (pg 278)
Certainly her mother's daughter in doing something incredibly unsafe and setting a terrible example, in this case by not getting proper medical treatment.
The atmosphere of decadence and frivolity created by the Queen’s children led the editor of The Sunday Times, Andrew Neil, to write a sharply critical editorial that resonated throughout the media. The perception took hold that not only were public funds being wasted on unproductive members of the royal
family, but that it was time for the Queen to pay taxes on her substantial private income.
In fact, the wheels were already turning quietly, albeit slowly, inside Buckingham Palace for the monarch to
contribute her fair share. (pg 361)
See! She was willing to pay her fair share after only nearly half a century on the throne as Queen. What are you complaining about!
On the 20th, Elizabeth II and Philip attended a service of thanksgiving at Westminster Abbey, where they had walked down the aisle fifty years earlier. In addition to their four children and six grandchildren, the royal couple was honored by seven kings, ten queens, a grand duke, twenty-six princes, and twenty-seven princesses, as well as fifty other couples, all ordinary citizens, who were also married in 1947. With memories still fresh from Diana’s funeral eleven weeks earlier, there was an added undercurrent of solemnity, especially when William and Harry arrived with their father. In a “throat-catching moment,” George Carey blessed the Queen and Philip as they knelt before him. “I found myself wondering if our nation was actually worthy of their devotion and unflagging sense of duty,” the archbishop recalled.(pg 413)
The archbishop really wants to keep that job.
LUCIAN FREUD UNVEILED Her Majesty the Queen at Buckingham Palace on December 20 and donated it to the Royal Collection in honor of the Golden Jubilee. Much of the reaction from the press was negative: “extremely unflattering,” said the Daily Telegraph; “a travesty,” pronounced The Sun.
The painting is shocking in several respects, starting with its size: only nine inches by six inches. Because it
is so small, it is peculiarly concentrated, showing only the Queen’s head and a small part of her shoulders. Without the diadem, she would be barely recognizable. “You gaze at it for half a minute,” said Clarissa Eden,
who was also painted by Freud. “Suddenly you realize it is the Queen.” Her face is harsh, the expression a scowl, the eyes hooded, the skin a rough patchwork of white and orange streaks, the heavy chin with a masculine five-o’clock shadow.
Yet despite Freud’s failure to show such attributes as her expressive eyes and luminous skin, he does capture in a mesmerizing way the essence of her dutiful and determined nature, as well as her strength and stoicism. “This is a painting of experience,” said Adrian Searle, art critic for The Guardian. So too is it an artwork of its time. “It could not have been painted ten years earlier,” said Sandy Nairne, director of the National Portrait Gallery since 2002. (pgs 432 and 433)
"Expressive eyes" and "luminous skin"; seriously, are you writing a biography or a cosmetic ad?
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. (pg 497)
Again with her superhuman powers of not sweating normally.
AN UNDERCURRENT TO the speculation about Charles as king is that he is destined to be a transitional figure with a short reign before the succession of his more popular son, Prince William. There is a saying that a strong sovereign must either be young and beautiful, or old and venerable; the Queen through her
long reign has managed to be both. (pg 522)
Don't forget godlike!
While the Diamond Jubilee was not set to get under way for another year, the royal wedding of 2011 was a fitting prelude. It brightened the outlook for the House of Windsor, seventy-five years after destiny touched a ten-year-old princess and placed the burden of leadership on her small shoulders. Elizabeth II fulfilled her duty with steadfast determination and clarity of purpose, exerting influence without grasping for power, retaining her personal humility despite her public celebrity— and above all, in good times and bad, spreading a carpet of happiness. (pg 537)
A carpet of happiness. A CARPET OF HAPPINESS.
______________________________________________________________________________________________
The late Prince Phillip was, to put it kindly, a controversial figure. Frequent spouter of racism and sexism, resentful of his wife, and not a great father to at least his oldest son (who would someday outrank him), but one of the dearest to the Queen. Can you guess how he will be portrayed?
Also, maybe it's a cheap shot, but the Queen and Prince were third cousins. And, okay, how much do you know about your third cousin? But here's the thing, they attended family functions of their family as cousins. Which make the whole "Philip is an outsider!" complaint very, very weird and more than a little labored.
Princess Elizabeth and Philip exchange a telltale glance at the wedding of their cousin Lady Patricia Mountbatten, October 1946. (pg 24)
If you were flirting with your cousin at a family wedding, I don't care if you're next in line to be the monarch of the realm, that's unnerving behavior.
Her choice was in some respects traditional, because the princess and Philip were relatives, but not too close to raise eyebrows. They were third cousins, sharing the same great-great-grandparents, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Philip was in fact more royal than Elizabeth, whose mother was mere British nobility (with distant links to English and Scottish kings), while his parents were Princess Alice of Battenberg (a great-grandchild of Queen Victoria) and Prince Andrew of Greece, the descendant of a Danish prince recruited for the Greek throne in the mid-nineteenth century. Lilibet and Philip were both connected to most of Europe’s reigning families, where consanguinity had been common for centuries. Queen Victoria and her husband had been even closer: first cousins who shared the same grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Coburg. Victoria’s mother (also Victoria) and Albert’s father, Ernest, were sister and brother. (pgs 25 and 26)
So yes, they were third cousins who shared great great grandparents.... WHO WERE LITERAL FIRST COUSINS.
Palace courtiers and aristocratic friends and relatives of the royal family viewed Philip suspiciously as a penniless interloper. They were irked that he seemed to lack proper deference toward his elders. But mostly, they viewed him as a foreigner, specifically a “German,” or in their less gracious moments, a “Hun,” a term of deep disparagement after the bloody conflict so recently ended. Even though his mother had been born in Windsor Castle, and he had been educated in England and served admirably in the British navy, Philip had a
distinctly continental flavor, and he lacked the clubby proclivities of the Old Etonians. What’s more, the
Danish royal family that had ruled in Greece was in fact predominantly German, as was his maternal grandfather, Prince Louis of Battenberg, and his sisters’ German husbands continued to be a touchy subject. (pg 30
HE IS LITERALLY HER COUSIN AND ATTENDED THEIR FAMILY EVENTS.
The press caught wind of the cousins’ romance as early as October 1946 at the wedding of Patricia Mountbatten to Lord Brabourne at Romsey Abbey. Philip was an usher, and when the royal family arrived, he escorted them from their car. The princess turned as she removed her fur coat, and the cameras caught them gazing at each other lovingly. “I think people thought ‘Aha!’ at that point,” recalled Patricia Brabourne. But no official confirmation followed, and the couple kept up an active social life. Elizabeth’s guardsmen friends served as her escorts to restaurants and fashionable clubs like The 400, and Philip would take Elizabeth and Margaret out to a party or the theater. But he was only one among many young men to dance with the heiress presumptive.
(pgs 32 and 33)
'COUSINS' ROMANCE'.
When they were with friends such as Rupert Nevill and his wife, Micky, the former Camilla Wallop (who had been in Elizabeth’s Girl Guides troop), and John and Patricia Brabourne, the royal couple showed an easy affection toward each other. During a visit to the Brabournes in Kent, John said to Philip, “I never realized what lovely skin she has.” “Yes,” Philip replied, “she’s like that all over. (pg 48)
PHILIP, NO.
They moved early in the summer of 1949, delighted at last to be in their own home together. They had adjacent bedrooms, connected by a door, his with masculine paneling, hers a feminine pink and blue, with canopy hangings “suspended from a crown” over the double bed. “In England the upper class always have
had separate bedrooms,” explained their cousin Lady Pamela Mountbatten (later Hicks). “You don’t want to
be bothered with snoring, or someone flinging a leg around. Then when you are feeling cozy you share your
room sometimes. It is lovely to be able to choose.” (pg 50)
Hmmmm.
In private on the train Philip tried to keep the atmosphere light, but he clearly found the journey stressful.“He was impatient. He was restless,” recalled Martin Charteris. “He hadn’t yet defined his role... He was certainly very impatient with the old style courtiers and sometimes, I think, felt that the Princess paid more attention to them than to him. He didn’t like that. If he called her a ‘bloody fool’ now and again, it was just his way. I think others would have found it more shocking than she did.”(pg 57)
Yeah, it's people's instant apologism to Philip's overall horrible behavior as a spouse that actually make them far worse.
Like Prince Albert, Prince Philip was considered an outsider by senior officials of the court. “Refugee husband,” he mockingly referred to himself. He was wounded by the slights he experienced. “Philip was constantly being squashed, snubbed, ticked off, rapped over the knuckles,” said John Brabourne. (pg 75)
HE IS LITERALLY HER COUSIN.
Given Philip’s matinee idol looks and eye for feminine beauty, he had been linked in the rumor mill for some time to various actresses and society beauties such as Pat Kirkwood, Helene Cordet, and Katie Boyle— all of whom denied anything more than friendship or a glancing acquaintance. The story of the “party girl” had no basis in fact, and Philip was “very hurt, terribly hurt, very angry” about the allegation. The Queen took the unusual step of authorizing her usually tight-lipped press secretary, Commander Richard Colville, to issue an explicit denial, saying, “It is quite untrue that there is any rift between the Queen and the Duke.” There the matter rested, although rumors of Philip’s supposed dalliances would continue to surface whenever he was
spotted on the dance floor or in lively conversation with a pretty woman. (pgs 121 and 122)
And there the author goes for her audience of one.
______________________________________________________________________________________________
And here we reach the meat of the book, after the complete fawning hagiography of the Queen. Every story needs a villain and the still enormously popular late Princess of Wales is as good as any. Princess Diana wasn't a saint by any means, and certainly had her faults and flaws. But she was a tireless champion of numerous good causes, some of them pretty radical at the time, and her care was genuine and tireless. Depending on who you believe, she was trapped in a system that did not care about her and saw her merely as a baby-oven, or at best was in way over her head and unsure of how the system worked. Her legacy inspired the Royal Family to make some serious changes to keep up with the times. You know what? Screw all of that. She was nothing but Satan. Read for yourself.
With [the Queen's close friend and advisor Patrick] Plunket’s death, the Queen lost not only a confidant but the sprightly tone he brought to court life. Her entertainments seemed more conventional, her guest lists less venturesome. Some even believe that if he had lived, he could have managed Diana, Princess of Wales, more effectively than anyone else in the royal household. (pg 260)
If only!
AT THE SAME time, Charles had become acquainted with Lady Diana Spencer, the granddaughter of the Queen Mother’s longtime friend and Woman of the Bedchamber, Ruth Fermoy (widow of the 4th Baron Fermoy), and the daughter of the Queen’s former equerry Johnnie Spencer, the 8th Earl and scion of one of
the great landed Whig families, with a fortune dating from the Middle Ages. The Spencers had been part of the group of English noblemen that had saved Britain from Catholic rule by bringing the Protestant Hanovers to England in 1714, a legacy that gave Diana a feeling of superiority over the royal family. Much later, after her marriage to Charles had fractured, she told her divorce lawyer, Anthony Julius, that she regretted marrying into a “German family.” (pg 297)
Groan, "feeling of superiority". I'm going to need to see some citations on that one, other than those sympathetic to the Queen.
The Spencers lived at Park House in Norfolk, which they rented from the Queen, and had three daughters— Sarah, Jane, and Diana— and a son, Charles. But while they lived only a stone’s throw from Sandringham, the family only had occasional contact with their royal neighbors after Johnnie resigned from the Queen’s household to make his living as a gentleman farmer. In September 1967, when Diana was six, Frances left
her husband for her lover, Peter Shand Kydd, which led to an acrimonious divorce followed by Frances’s marriage to Shand Kydd. Sarah and Jane Spencer were away at boarding school, so Diana and her three-year-old brother felt the brunt of the bitterness— an experience that marked Diana deeply and contributed to her lifelong emotional instability. At age nine she went to the first of two boarding schools, both of which provided a nurturing environment, although she was a poor student, twice failing all of her O-level exams. (pg 298)
A POOR STUDENT EVEN AS A CHILD! Just goes to show what kind of human that little girl from a broken home was. Seriously, what was the point of this?
When Prince Charles finished his five years in the Royal Navy at the end of 1976, the tabloid press dedicated itself to chronicling his romantic pursuits, a campaign that intensified in November 1978 when he turned thirty, the benchmark he had set three years earlier as “a good age for a man to get married.” One of his passing fancies was Sarah Spencer, but Diana caught his eye during a pheasant shoot at Althorp, the thirteen-thousand-acre estate in Northamptonshire that Johnnie Spencer inherited when his father died in 1975. Charles was twelve years older, but Diana at age sixteen shamelessly flirted with her sister’s beau and developed a full-fledged crush on the heir to the throne. (pg 298)
Okay, Sally Bedell Smith, you literally just put the blame on a (according to most accounts shy) sixteen-year-old for catching the eye of at twenty-eight-year-old. Kind of not hard to wonder how Andrew got away with what he did for so long.
If the royal family had taken the time to probe Diana’s friends and relatives, they would have come across elements of Diana’s character and background that would have given them pause: nagging insecurities that had been intensified by a troubled childhood, lack of discipline, shifting moods, signs of obsessive behavior, and difficulty telling the truth. Of these Ruth Fermoy was well aware, but as she later explained to Charles’s biographer Jonathan Dimbleby, she felt unable to voice her misgivings. “If I’d said to him, ‘You’re making a very great mistake,’ ” she said, “he probably wouldn’t have paid the slightest attention because he was being driven.” (pgs 297 and 298)
Decent citation needed on all of these, and man, Sally Bedell Smith is great at blaming Diana for having a troubled childhood.
None of the guests at the party could have known that Charles and Diana’s marriage was already beginning to unravel. The problems had begun when she was living in Buckingham Palace during their engagement and feeling isolated while Charles went about his royal duties. Secretly afflicted by bulimia, she rapidly lost weight, causing designer Elizabeth Emanuel to take in her wedding gown several times. Charles was thrown by his fiancée’s mood swings, alarming dependence, and accusations about Camilla Parker Bowles, with whom he had broken off his affair. (She and her husband, Andrew, were among the 3,500 guests at the service but had been excluded from the reception by Diana.) By the time the newlyweds reached Balmoral for their honeymoon after a two-week cruise on Britannia, Diana was tearful and angry, down to a mere 110 pounds on her five foot, ten inch frame. (pg 304)
Causing problems by having an eating disorder! Also, Charles was well-documentedly continuing his affair with Camilla as well as several other women. Diana may have been paranoid, but she was right about that.
The princess made clear how much she hated Royal Deeside and all it represented— the rituals of life in the castle and on the grouse moors, especially the shooting. “It was just impossible,” Philip recalled. “She didn’t appear for breakfast. At lunch she sat with her headphones on, listening to music, and then she would disappear for a walk or a run.” Nobody had ever flouted protocol as Diana did, or shown such disrespect to the Queen. Charles tried to cajole his wife, to no avail. He was ill equipped to deal with her demands so he
either lost his temper or withdrew, dismayed by the “other side” of the “jolly girl” who had enchanted him
with her sweetness. Finally, with his mother’s agreement, Charles had Diana flown to London for psychiatric
counseling, a gesture that she resented rather than welcomed. (pg 304)
Imagine putting this on the paper and getting it passed by an editor.
The Queen couldn’t avoid Diana’s disquieting behavior, but she preferred to blame it on the stresses of her new life rather than more deep-seated problems. She didn’t understand Diana— how for example she could be simultaneously empathetic and egocentric— in part because “the Queen is the least self-absorbed person
you could ever meet,” said one of her former top advisers. “She doesn’t tend to talk about herself, and she is
not interested in other people’s efforts to dwell too much on themselves.” (pgs 304 and 305)
Aw, both sycophancy AND villainization!
One happy interlude during these fraught times was the christening of Prince William on August 4, the Queen Mother’s eighty-second birthday. The Queen yielded center stage to the youngest and oldest members of the royal family, allowing her mother to hold the baby in her stead. Diana put on a good show that day, but in fact she had sunk into postnatal depression that she later called her “dark ages.” She had also resumed her secret bulimic bingeing and purging, and intensified her accusations about Camilla, refusing to believe that her husband had in fact broken off their affair. In September, while Diana and Charles were staying at Craigowan, a cottage on the Balmoral estate, she tried to cut herself with sharp objects, an alarming escalation of her erratic behavior that Charles did not share with his parents. Again he took Diana to London, where she underwent therapy with two different professionals before giving up after three months. (pgs 316 and 317)
How do you make suffering from psychological distress sound like a deliberate attempt to undermine the Royal Family?
Although he tried not to show it, Charles resented the adulation Diana received when they went out together. He had also become fed up with her moodiness and fixation on Camilla despite his repeated denials that he had even talked to his former lover much less seen her. Princess Michael of Kent, the wife of Charles’s cousin Prince Michael, told Roy Strong that Diana was a “catastrophe” and a “time bomb,” and that Charles’s unhappiness had deepened since his wife had become a “media queen.” (pg 328)
Princess Michael (who is only an in-law of the Royal Family, contrary to her delusions) is an insufferable racist social-climber who resented and resents Diana's vast popularity. No wonder this author quoted her.
To help boost Diana’s confidence, Elizabeth II had earlier that year taken the extraordinary step of issuing an official statement of support through a Palace spokesman who said, “The Queen could not be more pleased with her daughter-in-law. She is very proud of the Princess’s activities around the world and at home.” By then Diana had become more conscientious about her royal duties and had signed on as a patron of seven new charities beyond the five she had previously adopted, organizations dedicated to the arts as well as education and medicine. In her public engagements, Diana could be exceptionally effective, connecting with people, particularly the ill and downtrodden, with a warmth and empathy that other members of the royal family did not project. Combined with her celebrated beauty and high style, her egalitarian manner gave her an aura that was powerful— and potentially dangerous when she turned it against her husband. (pg 329)
Can't even compliment her legendary charitable works without undercutting it.
When Charles and Diana visited Washington in the autumn of 1985, they showed no sign of their private discord. Diana was jealous of anyone close to her husband, including Nancy Reagan, whom he unabashedly adored. Only a year earlier, Diana had confided to Andrew Neil, the editor of The Sunday Times, that the president was a “Horlicks”— a boring old man— and that the first lady cared only about being photographed
with members of the royal family. Neil found the comments surprisingly “bitter.” But the princess was all smiles at the White House dinner in their honor, where she memorably danced with John Travolta, as well as Neil Diamond and Clint Eastwood. (pg 329)
Wow, a public figure trashed controversial other public figures in private but smiled in public! THE DUPLICITY!
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.” (pgs 343 and 344)
The author is making another aim here; if she can't get the Queen as biographer, she'll make a grab for Charles. Poor Charles, forced to turn to Camilla (despite their affair having never really stopped by several accounts, Charles has only publicly admitted to it restarting in the '80s) for understanding, whereas Diana was clearly just looking for a cheap thrill from her affairs!
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. (pgs 344 and 345)
Fergie can't even be chastised without Diana getting some! Turns out it's Diana's fault. AGAIN!
[The Queen's] HECTIC DAYS in the United States were halcyon compared to what awaited her in London. The tabloids were working themselves into a speculative frenzy over the state of the Wales marriage as Charles and Diana approached their tenth wedding anniversary. Tabloid reporters knew that Charles had gone back
to Camilla, and they were on the scent of Diana’s affair with James Hewitt as well. Andrew Morton of The Sun was the most brazen, writing that Diana felt “humiliated that her husband prefers to spend so much time with Camilla rather than with her.” Several weeks before the July 29 anniversary, the princess began secretly collaborating with Morton on a tell-all book through a series of interviews conducted by Dr. James Colthurst, a mutual friend who acted as an intermediary to give author and subject deniability.(pg 36)
No mention of Camilla without a dutiful mention of Diana's affairs.
DIANA HAD REACHED a new and perilous stage in her relationship with the media— from realizing that she was a magnet for attention, to craving the attention, to seeking the attention, and now to using it as a weapon against Charles. In February, during their tour of India, she took aim with deadly accuracy by posing for photographers in “wistful solitude,” as the Daily Mail put it, in front of the romantic Taj Mahal. Her
unspoken message was that “the marriage was indeed on the rocks,” wrote Charles’s biographer Jonathan Dimbleby. (pgs 363 and 364)
Diana "craved the attention"? Seriously? The woman literally died begging photographers to leave her alone.
The Queen proceeded with her program in Paris even as she was fielding media queries behind closed doors from her forty-eight-year-old press secretary, Charles Anson. “Not once was there the slightest hint of annoyance,” recalled Anson, an unflappable and urbane veteran of two decades in the diplomatic service.
“The doors would open and the Queen would walk out into the public gaze as if she didn’t have a care in the
world.” She was, in fact, distressed. In consultations with Fellowes and her other advisers, she emphasized
that despite Diana’s betrayal, she wanted to try to keep the marriage together, if only for the sake of William
and Harry and to avoid any constitutional repercussions that might result for a divorced heir to the throne. (pgs 364 and 365)
Remember, Diana talking to a biographer for a sympathetic portrayal is "betrayal". Wonder how the Queen would describe her Nazi-sympathizing, coup-plotting uncle and his white supremacist wife? Oh right. The Queen attended both of their funerals and cuddled up in pictures to the woman for whom her uncle was willing to steal her life.
The second Sunday Times excerpt landed on June 14 when the Queen was back at Windsor, and the book came out two days later, on the first day of Royal Ascot. That Tuesday afternoon Charles and Diana met with his parents at the castle. It was an emotional encounter, according to Diana, who spoke about it with her
butler, Paul Burrell, as well as Morton’s collaborator, James Colthurst. The possibility of separation and divorce was discussed, but according to Burrell’s account, the Queen and Philip told the couple that they should stay together and “learn to compromise, be less selfish, and try to work through their difficulties for the sake of the monarchy, their children, the country and its people.”
Charles and his mother said little during the meeting, while Diana tearfully unloaded on her husband and Camilla, and Philip vented the family’s distress about the Morton book. For the first time since the Morton crisis began, Diana lied directly to her in-laws and her husband, reiterating that she had not helped the author. “Mama despaired as she listened to me,” Diana told Burrell. “All I seemed to be doing was relaying to her my anguish.”
With the lines of communication now open, the Queen asked Diana and Charles to return for a second meeting the following day. Not only did Diana refuse to come, she packed up and left Windsor Castle, prompting Philip to write her a two-page letter expressing his disappointment while offering some suggestions for dealing with her troubled marriage. It was the first of five thoughtful letters he wrote from June through September “in a friendly attempt to resolve a number of family issues,” each followed by a lengthy reply from Diana.
Acting in his role as head of the family, Philip tried to persuade his daughter-in-law to recognize her own faults as well as those of her husband, even as he praised her for the good work she had done. To promote compromise, he emphasized what she and Charles had in common, and he cited his own experience in giving up his independent career when his wife became Queen. In an effort to provide perspective, he wrote that being the wife of the heir to the throne “involved much more than simply being a hero with the British people.”
Although Diana described her father-in-law’s words as “stinging,” “wounding,” and “irate,” Philip’s private secretary, Brigadier Sir Miles Hunt-Davis, said later in sworn testimony that there was “not a single derogatory term within the correspondence.” Diana’s replies began “dearest Pa” and ended with “fondest love.” She told him she was “particularly touched” by his guidance, thanked him for being “heartfelt and honest,” and expressed admiration “for the marvelous way in which you have tried to come to terms with this intensely difficult family problem.” When Philip wrote that he was eager to “do my utmost to help you and Charles to the best of my ability” while conceding “I have no talents as a marriage counselor!!!” she responded, “You are very modest about your marriage guidance skills and I disagree with you! This last letter of yours showed great understanding and tact.” Implicit in Philip’s entreaties was the Queen’s support, which Diana acknowledged at one point by sending “much love to you both.”
In the end, Philip’s advice failed to move her, according to a friend who saw the letters, because “he never
touched Diana’s heart. He couldn’t, because he argued in terms of duty and not love.”
The entire royal family had swung over to Charles’s side now that they understood the full scale of Diana’s
treachery. Before the Morton book, Charles had been unable to talk to his parents about his troubles. “I think it took a long time to accept that the faults were not more his than hers,” said Patricia Brabourne. “The Queen could see through Diana’s manipulation, but in personal situations it was difficult to really know the truth. There were two sides to the story and you had to work out how to put them together.” Charles welcomed his parents’ newfound sympathy; Philip even sent his son a long letter referring to his “saint-like fortitude.” (pgs 365 and 366)
If you're starting to feel cornered reading this, imagine how Diana must've felt. Did any of this occur to the author?
In July, the prime minister contacted George Carey to say that the couple would likely separate in the autumn and divorce was now a distinct possibility. The prime minister asked the archbishop to participate in “some preparatory work on constitutional matters” along with Lord Mackay of Clashfern, the Lord Chancellor; cabinet secretary Robin Butler; and Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd. Carey also met separately with Diana and Charles. “It was my pastoral duty to assist them to conclude their marriage with grace and understanding,” he wrote. In the process, he came to see “with some sorrow that Charles was more sinned against than sinning. There was a streak in Diana’s psychological make-up that would not allow her to give in.” (pg 368)
Once again, someone knows who'll be monarch one day. Also, hello, misogyny.
THE ANNUAL BALMORAL holiday brought no escape from the family turmoil, this time created by Fergie, who was there at Andrew’s invitation. On Thursday, August 20, the Daily Mirror ran a page-one exposé headlined “FERGIE’S STOLEN KISSES.” It featured ten pages of photographs showing the thirty-two-year-old Duchess of York lounging bare-breasted on the French Riviera with her two daughters and her “financial
advisor,” a thirty-seven-year-old American named John Bryan. In one shot, Bryan was shown kissing Fergie’s toes, and in another they were embracing in front of two-year-old Eugenie.
At breakfast that morning, the royal family, their houseguests, and courtiers were confronted with the humiliating display. “It would be accurate to report that the porridge was getting cold,” Fergie wrote in her memoir. “Eyes wide and mouths ajar, the adults were flipping through the Daily Mirror and the rest of the tabloids... I had been exposed for what I truly was. Worthless. Unfit. A national disgrace.” She immediately apologized to the Queen, who was “furious” over her daughter-in-law’s stunningly poor judgment. “Her anger wounded me to the core, the more because I knew she was justified,” Fergie recalled. After three more days of chilly stares from her estranged in-laws, the disgraced duchess returned to London. She did not see Balmoral again for sixteen years.
Philip never forgave Fergie for dishonoring the family. “I don’t see her because I don’t see much point,” he
told author Gyles Brandreth. But the Queen, in her typically tolerant fashion, remained on good terms. During the Christmas holidays at Sandringham, she even arranged for Fergie to stay at nearby Wood Farm so her daughters could join her after celebrating with the rest of the family. “The Queen had an affection for her daughter-in-law, who often got things wrong,” said one of her senior advisers. “In a sense, though, Fergie was disarmingly guileless and you could see what she was doing up to a mile away.” Diana was another matter— secretive and scheming— and so was more difficult to forgive. (pgs 368 and 369)
Diana again, all but tempting Fergie to sin!
Four days after the Mirror scoop, the rival Sun dropped its own bombshell headlined “MY LIFE IS TORTURE.” The article quoted extensively from a surreptitiously recorded telephone conversation between Diana and thirty-three-year-old James Gilbey, an intimate friend who had also cooperated with the Morton book. The recording had been made at the end of December 1989 while Diana was staying at Sandringham.
Their conversation was sprinkled with endearments (he repeatedly called her “Squidgy” and she referred to him as “darling”) and sexual innuendo. She revealed her duplicity when she proposed various cover stories for their assignations. Most damning were her bitter comments about Charles and his relatives. “Bloody hell,” she said, “after all I’ve done for this fucking family.” (pg 369)
Try as the author and Royal sympathizers/boot-lickers might, that phone call was nothing compared to Tampongate and the author and the sympathizers know it well.
Diana didn’t flee Balmoral as Fergie had done. Instead, she turned, in the words of her private secretary Patrick Jephson, “alternately despairing, defiant, or lost in self-pity” and announced she would not accompany Charles on an official visit to Korea in November. Once again, the Queen intervened, this time with the help of Philip, and persuaded her to make the trip. It was a fig leaf at best. Back in London that autumn, both Charles and Diana consulted lawyers, but neither was able to take the difficult first step toward official separation.
The rush of sensational stories whipped up further attacks on the Queen for her exemption from taxes.(pg 370)
All criticism of the Queen is thanks to Diana. Thanks, Diana!
ANOTHER WAVE OF TABLOID HEADLINES IN MID-JANUARY ABRUPTLY dashed the Queen’s hopes for a dignified new year. Both the Daily Mirror and The Sun published compromising transcripts of a telephone conversation between Charles and Camilla that had been secretly recorded in mysterious circumstances
during December 1989, the same month as Diana’s now infamous “Squidgy” tape. In much of the conversation, Camilla tried to boost Charles’s spirits (“You’re a clever old thing, an awfully good brain lurking there, isn’t there?”). But attention focused on their inane sexual banter, especially Charles’s juvenile wish to be reincarnated as a tampon so he could “live inside your trousers.” The Palace declined comment, but the tapes were undeniably authentic and confirmed Diana’s allegations about her husband’s affair. In a poll published by the tabloid Today, 68 percent of the respondents thought Charles had tarnished his reputation, and 42 percent thought ten-year-old Prince William should be the next king. (pg 377)
And there it is again, the author making a plea for Charles.
None of the Queen’s children stirred up further problems in 1993, although Diana proved to be a continuing distraction. On the one hand, she devoted herself to a range of charitable causes such as drug and alcohol abuse, hospice care, debilitating illnesses such as AIDS, and services for mentally handicapped children. But behind the scenes she was feeding information on her whereabouts to Richard Kay, the royal reporter at the Daily Mail, in an effort to upstage Charles as well as other members of the royal family. She was also cooperating with Morton on yet another book.
She had ended her affair with James Hewitt, her former riding instructor, in 1991 when he became the focus of press surveillance. “She simply stopped ringing and taking my calls,” he said years later. She then became involved with a married art dealer named Oliver Hoare. It was a tempestuous relationship, something of an obsession for the princess, who pestered the Hoare household with anonymous telephone calls that prompted a police inquiry. The press got wind of the romance and began reporting sightings toward the end of 1993.
Around the same time, Diana tearfully announced that she was retiring from public life and needed “time and space” to get her bearings and focus on her sons, blaming the intolerable pressure of “overwhelming” media attention. Both the Queen and Prince Philip had urged her to proceed quietly if she wished to disengage from her royal obligations and her charities. Even though she opted for public melodrama, they still invited her to join the family at Sandringham for Christmas. In an atmosphere thick with tension, the Queen got particularly cross when a pack of tabloid “snappers” showed up to take pictures of the princess as she arrived. (pg 379)
Yes, Diana "opted for public melodrama". Sally Bedell Smith, you do realize you're insulting the mother of the future King, don't you?
She reserved her most withering fire for Charles, whose fitness for the throne she undermined by saying he would find the role of king “suffocating.” The “top job,” she said, “would bring enormous limitations to him, and I don’t know whether he could adapt to that.” As for his affair with Camilla, Diana memorably said, “There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.” She conveniently ignored the fact that during the time referred to— from 1986 onward— there were in fact four in the marriage, including James
Hewitt. The other line that resonated with the fifteen million TV viewers in Britain and millions more overseas was her wish to be “a queen of people’s hearts.” (pg 386)
And once again, the author conveniently ignores the evidence that Charles was having affairs throughout his relationship to Diana, not just with Camilla but with other women, and that infamous "Whatever love is" comment goes unremarked upon.
ON AUGUST 28, the Wales divorce became final, to the enormous relief of the royal family. But they had not anticipated that Diana had every intention of staying in the limelight. She forged a strategic new alliance with Tony Blair, leader of the Labour Party and candidate for the general election to be held in 1997. Early in the new year they met quietly at several private dinner parties where the dynamic young politician took Diana’s measure. He was mesmerized by her beauty and charisma, and she offered him advice on photo opportunities for his political campaign, speaking in “fairly calculating terms of how she had ‘gone for the caring angle.’ ” (pg 389)
This is one of the times where I almost threw the book. What a tacky, low-blow, passing on that nasty little bit of poorly sourced gossip to disparage a dead woman's most lasting legacy, her charity work, by insinuating it was all for optics. I'm glad Sally Bedell Smith's evident bid to be the official biographer failed, if for no other reason than this gross passage.
Diana met Dodi while she and her sons were staying at the ten-acre Fayed estate in Saint-Tropez. At age forty-two, Dodi was a classic case of arrested development: spoiled, ill-educated, unemployed, rootless, and irresponsible, with a taste for cocaine and fast cars. He showered Diana with extravagant gifts, including an $11,000 gold Cartier Panther watch, and sybaritic trips on his father’s plane and yachts. From the moment the story of their romance broke on August 7, the tabloids covered the couple’s every move with suggestive
photographs and lurid prose. William and Harry, who were at Balmoral with their father, mistrusted Dodi, and they were embarrassed by their mother’s exhibitionistic behavior. (pg 394)
Diana's "exhibitionistic" behavior, meaning when she was hounded by photographers on private trips and begging to be left alone? Again, bringing her children into this, when both have mentioned as adults how the media hounded and harassed their mother, is disgusting.
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. (pg 480)
Interesting given what we now know from Harry according to his book, and hey, for all the author's fawning over Philip, no mention about how Philip and Harry were at some points virtually identical-looking thus disproving more than ever that salacious rumor that Charles isn't Harry's biological father, but why miss yet another shot at the dead Diana?
All of this makes you wonder, given that the author has apparently written a biography of Diana as well. Given how Diana is portrayed in this book, I wouldn't be surprised if we learn Diana's drunk driving and flashing reporters is what caused the crash and her last words were "BLAME THE QUEEN AND CHARLES!" before collapsing on the British flag in a too-tight dress, having carelessly timed her death to ruin the Queen's vacation.
______________________________________________________________________________________________
Princess Margaret had a troubled relationship with her sister and an even more troubled life due to various factors (not least of which she was treated as disposable and her parents allowed her to be preyed upon by a groomer like Peter Townsend). She was glamorous and popular and funny, but also deeply troubled and displayed her bigotry on more than one occasion. She was a complicated figure and you know what? Screw it, let's make her a villain, too!
On October 31 Princess Margaret announced that she and Townsend were parting company. Although her sorrowful statement, written in collaboration with Townsend, emphasized her religious beliefs and sense of obligation to the Commonwealth, the true deciding factor was that she had been raised in luxury as a
princess, and she couldn’t face the prospect of living, as Kenneth Rose put it, “in a cottage on a group
captain’s salary” —outside the royal family that was the very essence of her identity. (pg 111)
To this day, sources still differ about Princess Margaret and Townsend. Some say that she would indeed have to give up certain things, and having seen the exile her uncle faced when abdicated from the Throne, she made a prudent decision to stick by her family. But that doesn't make the Queen look as good, so let's make her a scheming spoiled brat rather than someone groomed as a child by the much-older Townsend who would replace her with another teenager that he married at nineteen when he was in his late forties.
The controversy over Margaret’s dashed marital plans prompted some mild criticism, but mainly she drew praise for her willingness to sacrifice her happiness on the altar of royal duty. Margaret continued to live in Clarence House with her mother, making public appearances and cutting a glamorous figure, although some could see, as Tommy Lascelles described it, that she had become “selfish and hard and wild.” Like her father before her, the Queen coddled her sister rather than confronting her when she misbehaved. (pg 111)
The Queen's real problem was caring too much, you see!
The result is an arresting three-quarter view of the Queen bareheaded, in her capacious dark blue robes of the Order of the Garter against a bleak imaginary landscape. Her demeanor is regal, her expression contemplative, with a hint of determination. The Queen was happy with the portrait, and Margaret praised the artist’s success with her sister’s elusive mouth. The following year Margaret sat thirty-three times for her own Annigoni portrait, which she considered so beautiful it moved her to tears. When American artist Frolic Weymouth asked Margaret her opinion of her sister’s portrait, she sniffed, “Mine was better than hers.” (pg 112)
Do we really believe that that wasn't meant to be a joke and that she would really say something seriously like that? Or that she didn't mean she thought her portrait captured her more and that her sister's portrait didn't capture her likeness?
While the Queen would engage people in conversation, Princess Margaret would address them in what museum director Roy Strong described as a “slightly explosive drawl.” She was more insistent on formalities than the sovereign, rebuking friends when they unwittingly violated protocol with a word or a gesture. “If you missed the ‘royal’ in ‘Your Royal Highness,’ she would rip you to shreds,” said one of her friends. “She would say, ‘There are members of Arab states who are highnesses. I am a royal one.” One slyly believable moment in the film The Queen had Helen Mirren’s Elizabeth II remarking, “I don’t measure the depth of a curtsy... I leave that to my sister.” (pg 150)
I never thought I'd be sympathetic to Princess Margaret, but here we are. She was raised to be a "Spare" so of course she would probably insist on formalities to cling to what she could. Again, complexity, particularly as it comes to downfalls, is only reserved for the Queen by this author.
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A stickler for protocol, Queen Mary insisted Lilibet and Margaret Rose curtsy to her whenever they met. She rigorously suppressed her emotions— exhibiting, at most, a slight shift of her lips to indicate amusement— and impressed on Lilibet that it was inappropriate for a monarch to smile in public. (pg 14)
Wow, Queen Mary sounds insufferable.
When England celebrated Victory in Europe Day on May 8, 1945, Elizabeth joined her family and Prime Minister Winston Churchill on the balcony at Buckingham Palace to greet the cheering throngs. That night, she and Margaret Rose escaped the confines of the Palace with Crawfie, Toni de Bellaigue, and the King’s
equerry as their chaperones. Among the group of sixteen were their cousin Margaret Rhodes and several guards officers, including Henry Porchester, who would become her lifelong friend and closest adviser on horse breeding and racing. Proudly wearing her ATS uniform, the future Queen linked arms with her friends and surged through the crowds, tearing along St. James’s Street, and joyfully dancing the conga, the Lambeth Walk, and the hokey-cokey. (pg 22)
The what?
Eighty-one-year-old Queen Mary brought her brother, the Earl of Athlone, and his wife, Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone. “Glad it’s all over,” mumbled the earl. “All for the best, I suppose— horrid business.” After the elderly trio had been taken to see the newborn, they returned with the King and Queen as well as the doctors for a round of champagne. Sir John Weir, one of the official physicians to the royal family, confided to Queen Elizabeth’s private secretary, Major Thomas Harvey, that he’d “never been so pleased to see a male organ in all his life.” (pg 49)
Uhhhhh.
Elizabeth II returned to England on the Argonaut that had flown her to Kenya only a week earlier. When the erstwhile princess walked by his seat several times, Philip’s valet John Dean noted that “she looked as if she might have been crying.” Mike Parker said Philip “was like the Rock of Gibraltar, comforting her as best he could.”
Dressed in a simple black coat and hat, she held her composure as she arrived at London Airport near dusk on February 7, 1952, after a nineteen-hour flight. Waiting on the tarmac was a small delegation of men in dark overcoats, top hats, and homburgs led by her uncle the Duke of Gloucester and Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Foreign Minister Anthony Eden and his fellow government ministers stood bareheaded as she slowly shook hands with each of them, and they gave her deep bows. A Daimler bearing the sovereign’s coat of arms on its roof drove her to Clarence House, where eighty-four-year-old Queen Mary honored her by reversing roles, curtsying and kissing her hand, although she couldn’t help adding, “Lilibet, your skirts are much too short for mourning.” (pgs 65 and 66)
Yeah, Queen Mary didn't die soon enough.
In a speech to the House of Commons five days after Elizabeth took the throne, Churchill described her as “a fair and youthful figure... the heir to all our traditions and glories,” assuming her position “at a time when a tormented mankind stands uncertainly poised between world catastrophe and a golden age.” He expressed hope that the new Queen would be “a signal for... a brightening salvation of the human scene.” A promising young Conservative politician named Margaret Thatcher had her own sanguine view, writing in a newspaper column that “if, as many earnestly pray, the accession of Elizabeth II can help to remove the last shreds of prejudice against women aspiring to the highest places, then a new era for women will indeed be at hand.” (pg 68)
Oh, the irony!
Charles was only three when his mother took the throne, and Anne was eighteen months old, so their life was spent mainly in the six-room nursery complex on the second floor of Buckingham Palace or out in the extensive gardens, overseen by their two nannies. In her first gesture of modernity, Elizabeth II dropped the tradition of requiring formal bows and curtsies from her children when they were very young. (pg 74)
Kind of her, wouldn't you say, not demanding formality from toddlers.
The freedom she enjoyed as a young princess— she once attended a ball at the American ambassador’s residence dressed as an Edwardian parlor maid, with Philip costumed as a waiter— had to be subdued, at least in public. (pg 77)
Yeah, unfortunate costumes seem to run in this family.
When the Queen approached the high altar, her heavy skirt swinging “backwards and forwards in a beautiful rhythmic effect,” the Boys Choir of Westminster School sang out, “Vivat Regina Elizabetha! Vivat! Vivat! Vivat!,” the sole remnant of Latin in the entire service. (pg 84)
If you were trying to understand what they were chanting at Camilla during the Coronation last May, now you know.
In retrospect, it’s clear why Elizabeth II did not want to force the issue. Divorced people were excluded from royal garden parties and other gatherings in the sovereign’s palaces and on the royal yacht. Her grandfather had first admitted “innocent parties” in divorce to the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, and the Queen had relented to include “guilty parties” as well. Still, she had an almost visceral reaction to divorce, which she had inveighed against in her only major speech as a princess. “She strongly believed that divorce was catching,” said Lady Elizabeth Anson, a cousin of the Queen through the Queen Mother’s Bowes Lyon family. “If one
got divorced, it made it easier for another unhappy couple to get divorced.” (pgs 98 and 99)
Yikes.
Elizabeth II has also been known to carry a bag hook, an ingenious item designed for practicality. “I watched the Queen open her handbag and remove a white suction cup and discreetly spit into it,” recalled a dinner guest at the Berkshire home of the Queen’s cousin Jean Wills. “The Queen then attached the cup to the underside of the table. The cup had a hook on it, and she attached her handbag to it.” (pg 104)
This isn't the first time I'm hearing this, but I really need to know why the Queen wouldn't just carry a spray bottle rather than spitting, no matter how discreetly. Did she think her saliva and thus personal germs were chosen by God, too?
For its maiden voyage, Britannia brought Prince Charles and Princess Anne to be reunited with their parents in early May 1954 for the first time in nearly half a year. The Queen was pleased that she would be seeing her children earlier than she had anticipated, but she worried that they wouldn’t know their parents. The Queen Mother wrote to allay her daughter’s concerns, saying, “You may find Charles much older in a very endearing way.” Still, when the moment came and the Queen was piped aboard, her strict control and conformity to protocol prevailed as it had when she met her son after her Canada trip. “No, not you dear,” she said as she greeted dignitaries first, then shook the five-year-old’s extended hand. The private reunion was warm and affectionate, as Prince Charles showed his mother all around the yacht where he had been living for more than a week. The Queen told her mother how happy she was to be with her “enchanting” children again. They had both “gravely offered us their hands,” she wrote, “partly I suppose because they were somewhat overcome by the fact that we were really there and partly because they have met so many new people recently! However the ice broke very quickly and we have been subjected to a very energetic routine and innumerable questions which have left us gasping!” But the repercussions of that chilly first encounter were evident four decades later in a biography of Prince Charles by Anthony Holden, who titled a chapter about the prince’s childhood “No, Not You Dear.” (pg 106 and 107)
If you think Prince Harry's Spare was the first controversial Royal memoir, you haven't been paying attention.
He vaulted into the aristocracy when he married the third daughter of the 9th Duke of Devonshire, Lady Dorothy Cavendish, who tormented him by conducting a decades-long affair with Robert Boothby, a
flamboyant and amusing bisexual politician. (pg 123)
Cool biphobia/homophobia, Sally Bedell Smith. Ew.
The downside of the Queen’s approach to motherhood had been clear to Clarissa Eden during a stay at Windsor Castle in April 1955 when she and her husband joined the royal family for a picnic. Six-year-old Charles flopped onto Anthony Eden’s chair, prompting the Queen to tell the boy to move. When he refused,
she asked him again, “because it is the prime minister’s cushion and he is tired.” But the young prince
wouldn’t budge. Then when Charles wouldn’t eat his food because he hadn’t washed his hands, the Queen Mother indulged him by saying, “Oh I do understand the feeling. Put some water in a saucer for him.” Clarissa Eden was mildly amused by the prince’s spoiled behavior, but surprised that the Queen “didn’t say,
‘Come on Charles, get up,’ but I suppose she doesn’t like scenes at all cost.” (pg 125)
So the Queen refused to do some parenting, or let Charles's nanny do some parenting?
She had an affectionate relationship with the sixty-seven-year-old American president that dated back to World War II when Eisenhower was in London as Supreme Allied Commander. He had enjoyed a “devoted friendship” with her parents, and he liked to recount how they had once arranged for him to have a special
tour of the private areas of Windsor Castle. To ensure the general’s privacy, they had decided to remain in
their apartments. But on the appointed day George VI had forgotten, and he and his family were on a terrace above the rose garden having tea with Margaret Rhodes at a table covered to the ground with a white tablecloth. As Eisenhower and his group approached, the King knew that their presence would stop the tour. “We all dived under the table and hid,” the Queen said years later. “If [Eisenhower] and his party had looked up... they would have seen a table shaking from the effect of the concerted and uncontrollable giggles of those sheltering beneath it,” recalled Margaret Rhodes. When George VI later recounted the story to Eisenhower, the general “was so staggered by the King of England hiding,” said Elizabeth II. (pg 132)
I don't know if this has been represented on screen but I hope so.
Vice President Richard Nixon treated the royal couple to a luncheon with ninety-six guests in the orchid-bedecked old Supreme Court chamber in the Capitol. It was their first encounter with the incisive but socially awkward vice president. Perhaps taking note of the recent criticism of the Queen, Nixon talked to her about speaking techniques. The next day he even sent her a book with some “rather startling ideas” that he thought could be helpful: The Art of Readable Writing, by noted language expert Dr. Rudolf Flesch, an advocate of “plain talk.” (pg 134)
That's pretty funny.
On the third day the Queen indulged in some unusual departures from the normal run of activities. She had specifically asked to see an American football “match,” as she put it, so the White House arranged for her to sit in a “royal box” at the fifty yard line at the University of Maryland’s Byrd Stadium for a game against the University of North Carolina. On the way she spotted a Giant supermarket and asked if a visit might be arranged so she “could see how American housewives shop for food.”
To the cheers of 43,000 spectators, the Queen walked onto the field to chat with two opposing players, both
strapping lads in crew cuts. Dressed in a $15,000 mink coat given to her by Mutation Mink Breeders Association, a group of American fur farmers, she watched the game intently but seemed “perturbed” whenever the players threw blocks. It was a quintessential American display: cheerleaders doing cartwheels, high-stepping drum majorettes, marching bands, and North Carolina girls costumed in large cigarette packs covering their heads and torsos, dancing as an announcer boasted about their state’s “parade of industries.”
While the royal pair was being entertained at halftime, security men raced back to the supermarket to arrange for a visit on the fly. After Maryland’s 21–7 victory, the motorcade arrived at the Queenstown Shopping Center at 5 P.M., to the amazement of hundreds of shoppers. Elizabeth II and Philip had never before seen a supermarket, a phenomenon then unknown in Britain, and their visit was noteworthy for its spontaneity and novelty.
With the curiosity of anthropologists and an informality they had not displayed publicly in Britain, they spent
fifteen minutes shaking hands, quizzing customers, and inspecting the contents of shopping carts. “How nice that you can bring your children along,” said Elizabeth II, nodding toward the little seat in one housewife’s cart. Queen and consort were amazed not only at the quantities of food but the range of products— clothing, stationery, toiletries, even Halloween costumes. She took a particular interest in frozen chicken pot pies, while he nibbled on sample crackers with cheese and joked, “Good for mice!” They both heard about refrigeration techniques and were particularly intrigued by the checkout counters, which cashier David Ferris explained as the monarch walked through the lane. “Thank you for the tour,” the Queen said to supermarket manager Donald D’Avanzo. “I enjoyed it very much.” D’Avanzo announced afterward that he had been “amazed and scared.. It was the greatest thing that ever happened to me.” (pgs 134 and 135)
The Queen of England turning up at a supermarket in a mink coat and scaring shoppers by trying to mingle casually is quite an image.
Buchanan had arranged for a light to be placed on the floor of the royal couple’s car that was switched on for their drive to Idlewild Airport, illuminating the Queen’s dress and tiara for the throngs of spectators lining the streets of Manhattan and Queens. Many of the women wore bathrobes and had curlers in their
hair. “Philip,” said Elizabeth II, “look at all those people in their nightclothes. I certainly wouldn’t come out
in my nightclothes to see anyone drive by, no matter who it was!” (pgs 137 and 138)
You're literally dressed (and undressed) and coiffed by an entourage all of your life.
Following discussions among her private secretaries and government ministers, a formula emerged in which the royal family would continue to be called “The House and Family of Windsor,” but the Queen’s “de-royalised” descendants— starting with any grandchildren who lacked the designation of “royal highness”—would adopt the surname “Mountbatten-Windsor.” Those in the immediate line of succession, including all of the Queen’s children, would continue to be called “Windsor.” It seemed clear-cut, but thirteen years later Princess Anne, at the urging of Dickie and Prince Charles, would contravene the policy on her wedding day by signing the marriage register as “Mountbatten-Windsor.” (pg 147)
A note that all of Prince Harry and Meagan Markle's children are "Mountbatten-Windsor".
Hewing to an upper-class ritual long after the advent of feminism in the 1970s, Elizabeth II and the women withdraw from the dining room after dinner, leaving the men to enjoy port and cigars at the table. “She never batted an eye,” recalled Jean Carnarvon, the widow of her longtime racing manager. “It was just expected.” Conversation in these vestigial female groupings might touch on harmless personal matters while yielding little about the Queen’s views. (pg 170)
"Feminism was invented in the 1970s!" -- Sally Bedell Smith
Starting in 1965, his Labour majority pushed through laws abolishing capital punishment, ending government censorship, liberalizing abortion, lowering the voting age to eighteen, reforming divorce, and decriminalizing homosexuality. Wilson’s government nearly doubled the number of universities, significantly expanding free higher education (a practice that would end thirty-three years later with the introduction of means-tested tuition fees). At the same time, he eroded the quality of secondary education by eliminating the publicly funded selective grammar schools that had educated not only Wilson but other prominent British leaders such as Margaret Thatcher and Edward Heath. Those academically rigorous schools were replaced by egalitarian comprehensive schools with lower scholastic standards. To pay for the expanded government programs, the Labour Party binged on borrowing and raised taxes. (pg 182)
So many things are a lot more recent than they should be.
While her relationship with Wilson was warm from the outset, Elizabeth II knew that most of his class-conscious colleagues took a dim view of the monarchy and the Queen. Yet she managed over time to win over some of the hardest cases, among them Barbara Castle, the flame-haired firebrand known as Labour’s
Red Queen, and Richard Crossman, described by historian A. N. Wilson as a “large, shambolic bisexual.” (pg 184)
Again, why bring that up?
The Royal Stud at Sandringham is a picturesque late-nineteenth-century complex of red-brick and native brown carrstone stables topped by chimneys and cupolas. The mares inhabit roomy boxes that can easily accommodate newborn foals, but each stallion lives like a king in his considerably larger box with tiled walls, ten inches of wood chips on the floor, high windows, a pitched roof of wood and Norfolk reed, and infrared lights for drying off. There are four paddocks of two acres apiece for the stallions, enclosed by brick walls and hedges, with nearby gardens and fountains.
The main business of the stud takes place in the covering shed, a cavernous structure with a sandy floor. The
Queen’s breeding and racing advisers make suggestions about mating, but unlike her role as sovereign, where she follows the guidance of others, she often takes the initiative, based on her observations as well as her extensive knowledge of bloodlines. She knows which horses are good for stamina, which for speed, and which possess the ineffable trait of courage. She is an astute judge of conformation—whether, as Henry Porchester observed, “a horse had a good shoulder, short cannon bones, good feet, flat feet, bent or straight hocks, good quarters, a nice eye or quality head.” She famously discovered that a stable had mixed up two of her yearlings, Doutelle and Agreement, that she had only previously seen once as foals. “She reads a lot, and she knows a lot,” said Michael Oswald. “If you want to discuss a sales catalogue you should do your homework, because she’ll know who a horse’s great-great-grandmother was.” The final decision “rests always with the Queen,” wrote Arthur FitzGerald in his official history of the Royal studs.
Oswald jocularly refers to the Sandringham Stud as the “Maternity Help and Marriage Guidance Center for Horses.” But the act of live cover—breeding a multi-million-dollar prize-winning stallion with one of the Queen’s valuable mares—is not for the faint of heart. Rather, it is a serious exercise in controlled lust between two powerful and highly strung creatures, each weighing nearly a ton. As a measure of her earthy nature as a countrywoman, the Queen has witnessed the raw reality of thoroughbred matchmaking any number of times. The otherwise prim and proper Queen would stand in a corner of the covering shed with her stud manager and grooms, wearing a hard hat for protection before the health and safety authorities required her to build an elevated viewing stand. “She is very matter-of-fact,” said Michael Oswald. “She knows how it works.”
The fast, furious, and potentially dangerous mating act begins when a mare in heat is brought into the covering shed. Her rear legs are encased in heavy leather boots to prevent her from kicking the stallion, and a thick leather “false mane” is strapped across her neck and withers so she is not bitten during the frenzy of coitus.
The mare is first brought to one side of the shed, a padded wall with a large opening where she and a “teaser” stallion engage in equine foreplay, and if she is sufficiently aroused—an unmistakable reaction known as clitoral “winking”— the veterinarian will examine her by palpation and ultrasound to determine whether she is about to ovulate. If so, she returns to the covering shed, where she stands in a slight hollow in the middle. One groom holds her bridle and another has a “twitch,” a pole with a loop of rope that sedates the mare when twisted around the end of her nose. The highly excited stallion of choice is held by four men as he strains, snorts, whinnies, and rears before mounting the mare, his violent exertions guided by a stud groom standing near her tail.
Once conception has been confirmed by ultrasound, the Queen tracks the eleven-month gestation, and occasionally she watches the mare foaling, which usually occurs at night. Typically she is sent a photograph of the foal, which she sometimes will name even before birth, and she follows its development until it is weaned and shipped out as a yearling to Polhampton.
During one of the Queen’s visits to Polhampton, she accompanied Henry Porchester, her stud groom Sean Norris, her trainer Ian Balding and his wife, Emma, into a field to have a better look at six colts about to be broken in. Suddenly the colts started galloping around in a circle and “dive bombing,” rearing up and kicking out. Only Balding and the Queen stayed in place, while their three companions bolted for the gate. Elizabeth II and her trainer knew that if they remained motionless, the young horses would not attack them and would eventually settle down.
“Oh, that was scary,” the Queen said afterward. “She was completely unruffled,” Balding recalled, having witnessed an unflinching physical courage that is one of her defining traits. “She has the ability to get calmer in the face of problems rather than allowing herself to get her adrenaline up and to panic,” said Monty Roberts, the California horse trainer known as the “horse whisperer,” who was to become her close friend. (pgs 187 and 188)
Was that long, weird section about horse mating rituals really distracting and unpleasant? Yes! Did a biography of Queen Elizabeth need that level of pedantic detail? No!
She continued her rounds of official duties— one hundred or more events in most years— effectively and enthusiastically. Her enjoyment was infectious, notably when she threw up her hands in a theatrical outburst of delight. Deborah Devonshire nicknamed her “Cake” after observing her at a wedding reception. On hearing that the bride and groom were about to cut the cake, the Queen Mother exclaimed “Oh, the Cake!”
as if seeing the ritual for the first time. “She really is superb at her own type of superbery,” the Duchess wrote to her sister Diana in 1965. At a dinner party given by John Profumo at his home in Regent’s Park a year before his fall from grace, the Queen Mother even joined Ted Heath, David Bruce, and several aristocrats in practicing the twist, the latest dance craze, late into the night.
She loved to entertain her friends with extravagant black-tie dinners at her various homes, and al fresco luncheons served by a half dozen liveried footmen on tables set with white cloths and fine silver under a canopy of trees in the garden of Clarence House. The crowd was more eclectic than at the monarch’s table, since she could invite anybody she pleased, including dancers, artists, writers, and actors who amused her and could make bright conversation. The food was beautifully presented, and the claret flowed freely, along with her piquant opinions—outspoken criticisms of politicians, most of them Labour, her hatred of “the Japs,” and suspicious view of the Germans and the French (“so nice & so nasty... How can one trust them?”). Recalling an encounter with Dinka tribesmen in the Sudan, she declared, “They were naked, but they were so black it didn’t matter!”
The Edwardian world of the Queen Mother had a certain air of unreality. When her longtime friend Tortor Gilmour moved to a smaller house in her village, the Queen Mother came to tea and lamented the mundane view from the front windows. “Darling,” she said, “you must have them close the petrol station and move that school.” Surveying the scene during one of her elegant luncheons at Clarence House, the Queen Mother and former Queen said, “Look at us. We are just ordinary people— look at us around this table— having an ordinary lunch.” (pgs 193 and 194)
The Queen Mother being an out-of-touch racist is a lot less shocking than you'd suspect.
Yet Heath, who was Wilson’s exact contemporary, proved to be heavy going for the Queen, who was ten years his junior. Like his Labour predecessor, his origins were modest. He had excelled in the grammar school system and earned his degree at Oxford. Heath’s provincialism had a cultured gloss from his expertise in classical music and skill as a yachtsman, although neither was a fruitful source of small talk with Elizabeth II. A confirmed bachelor described as “celibate” by Philip Ziegler, his official biographer, Heath was at best indifferent to women and at worst contemptuous of them. (pg 242)
"Confirmed bachelor" that's "indifferent to women." I wonder if he has a "lifelong male companion."
At the same time, the British tabloid press was beginning to take a more aggressive and sensational approach to the royal family. In the lead were The Sun and News of the World, which had been acquired in 1969 by Australian publisher Rupert Murdoch, an avowed republican who saw the monarchy as the apex of
a “pyramid of snobbery.” The Queen was his country’s head of state; those who shared Murdoch’s wish for a republic numbered around a quarter of the Australian population, including the Labour government that took power in December 1972, with Gough Whitlam as prime minister. In Britain, Murdoch saw an opportunity to scrutinize the behavior of the royal family and expose them if they misbehaved, a formula designed to drive up his newsstand sales while chipping away at the monarchy’s standing. (pg 251)
Rupert Murdoch resenting monarchy is something I guess.
Three days before Easter, she also marks Maundy Thursday, a modern ritual signifying humility that is based on Jesus washing the feet of his disciples at the Last Supper. In past centuries monarchs actually cleansed the feet of the poor, a practice that ended in 1685 with James II. Instead, they distributed alms, and in the Queen’s reign, the recipients of “Maundy Money” have been elderly subjects chosen for their service to the community. At Philip’s suggestion, she changed the location of the service in 1957 to a cathedral outside London for the first time, and since then she has traveled around the country. The pageantry is intricately orchestrated, with her white-ruffed and scarlet-coated Yeomen of the Guard carrying silver trays holding purses filled with specially minted silver coins. The Queen moves along a line of men and women in equal number based on the monarch’s age, and hands each of them a purse, often adding a word of congratulations for their good work. (pg 265)
Let's bring back the original tradition.
Margaret had married on the rebound from Peter Townsend. She had known Tony for only a year when they became secretly engaged late in 1959 shortly after Margaret heard that at age forty-seven Townsend was planning to marry a nineteen-year-old Belgian girl. “ (pg 269)
Gross!
Queen and prime minister thrived in a masculine world, but in different ways. Elizabeth II “was reserved but she could give you not quite a come-hither look, but one which was so friendly as to be encouraging,” said her long-serving courtier Edward Ford. “She made us feel like men.” (pg 291)
Super-gross! Exploring the Queen holding power at a time for it to be rare for women to hold power would be a fascinating subject to dissect, but instead, creepy flattering quotes.
The Queen called the hospital and had a long conversation with family members [of the murdered Lord Mountbatten, but only Philip wrote a condolence letter. As a Red Cross doctor explained to Patricia Brabourne, “That kind of private person has strong feelings but doesn’t want to convey them. She would feel what she might say would be totally inadequate, so why try.” By contrast when her sister Pamela Hicks once wrote a note about the death of one of the royal corgis, the Queen replied with a six-page letter. “A dog isn’t important,” Hicks figured, “so she can express the really deep feelings she can’t get out otherwise.” (pg 295)
The mental gymnastics required to make the Queen sympathetic are really something to watch.
ONE OF THE prominent guests at the wedding festivities was Nancy Reagan. The first lady had met Charles years earlier through Walter Annenberg, Nixon’s envoy to Britain, and his wife, Lee, during a visit to California while the prince was serving in the Royal Navy. Nancy Reagan also endeared herself to the royal family by treating Charles to dinner in the private quarters of the White House the previous May, with a collection of guests that included Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, William F. Buckley, and Diana Vreeland. “I have fallen in love with Mrs. Reagan,” Charles told Mary Henderson, wife of British ambassador Nicholas Henderson. “I wanted to kiss her!” (pg 302)
Get in line, Charles! (A cheap yet irresistible joke, I'm sorry.)
The war resulted in 255 British and 650 Argentine deaths before Argentina surrendered on June 14. Andrew was never involved in direct combat, although he flew a Sea King helicopter in a number of diversionary actions, transported troops, and conducted search and rescue operations— any of which could have put him in harm’s way. He lost friends and colleagues, and once was on deck when Exocet missiles were fired at the ship. “I definitely went there a boy and came back a man,” he said (pg 310)
Andrew was Elizabeth's favorite and the author knows it.
Reagan’s predecessor, Jimmy Carter, had met the Queen only twice, during her stop in Washington for the Bicentennial, and on his inaugural foreign trip as president to “the first country that I have visited outside my own” on May 5, 1977. He was in England for economic and foreign policy meetings, followed by a black-tie dinner for NATO leaders at Buckingham Palace. When Carter (wearing a bow tie three times the size of
Philip’s) greeted the Queen’s seventy-six-year-old mother, he tried to flatter her by comparing her to his own
beloved mother, “Miz Lillian,” and in a burst of enthusiasm kissed her on the lips. “I took a sharp step backwards,” the Queen Mother recalled, “not quite far enough.” She commented afterward that she hadn’t been kissed that way since the death of her husband twenty-five years earlier. (pg 311)
Looking around, that apparently really did happen, but sadly there is no footage.
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. (pgs 337 and 338)
Did you seriously just use the "But they call themselves that!" excuse?!
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.” (pg 338)
Not just the Queen is awarded the gift of complexity, Philip the bigot gets some too.
The most diverting moment of her visit occurred in one of the city’s downtrodden neighborhoods, where Elizabeth II visited a 210-pound African American great-grandmother, sixty-seven-year-old Alice Frazier. The purpose was to see Frazier’s newly built home, which she had purchased under a private-public program for low-income first-time owners. As the Queen entered the house, Frazier vigorously shook her hand, said,
“How are you doin’?,” then wrapped her arms around her guest and gave her an exuberant bear hug. Elizabeth II smiled gamely over Frazier’s shoulder as she stiffly leaned forward, arms held tightly at her waist until she was released. “It’s the American way,” Frazier said afterward. “I couldn’t stop myself.”(pg 358 and 359)
Why on earth is it necessary to mention her weight, especially like that? And how exactly does the author know her weight? Ms Frazier doesn't look a great deal different size-wise from the Queen in the photos. Also, the Queen is in Ms Frazier's country and city as a visitor. The Queen should be observing the local customs, not the other way around. Wonder if Alice Frazier wasn't a Black woman this might've been written differently? Remember the fuss about Michelle Obama lightly putting her hand on the Queen's back?
Still in a cast, [the Queen] embarked on a three-week tour of six Caribbean countries and Bermuda in February and March. Visiting that part of the world gave her special satisfaction. “She has no regard for color,” said longtime BBC correspondent Wesley Kerr, a native Jamaican raised by white foster parents in Britain. “Jamaica is her fourth-biggest realm. When she refers to herself as the Queen of Jamaica she says it with utter conviction. In the Caribbean there is a closeness.” (pg 380)
"No regard for color" sounds a lot like colorblind racism. Also, it's not "closeness" it's colonialism.
That night at dinner in Buckingham Palace, Prince Philip helped resolve one of the lingering questions about the funeral: would William and Harry follow the tradition of royal males and walk with their father and uncle Charles Spencer behind their mother’s coffin? Both boys, especially William, had been reluctant all week to commit to something so public. William had resisted mainly because he was “consumed by a total hatred of the media” after their hounding of his mother, according to Alastair Campbell. Palace officials feared that if the Prince of Wales walked without his sons, he risked “being publicly attacked,” Campbell recorded in his diary. (pg 406)
That's right, then-Prince Charles forced his underage sons grieving their mother to walk with him as a boo-shield.
The most unexpected response came from Princes William and Harry, aged nineteen and seventeen, who talked about the Queen Mother’s whimsical side in an interview. They described how they had taught their hundred-year-old great-grandmother to imitate Sacha Baron Cohen’s Ali G after she had watched the comedian on television. At the end of the family’s Christmas luncheon that year, she had stood up and declared, “Darling, lunch was marvelous—respec!” and clicked her fingers, Ali G style. (pg 439)
Yikes.
ON SATURDAY, APRIL 9, 2005, the Prince of Wales finally married the love of his life, Camilla Parker Bowles, thirty-four years after they first met, and nearly two decades after they resumed their romance in the mid-1980s. He was fifty-six and she fifty-seven. (pg 459)
Love of his life, no matter the affairs on the side! The whole "love of his life" is calculated PR manufacturing by the former Prince of Wales to get the public to accept Camilla. The author dutifully does the future King's work.
But the social media only softened the lash of Britain’s national newspapers, which remained more influential than the press in the United States. In 2010 and 2011 their prime target was Prince Andrew, Britain’s special representative for trade and investment since 2001. His global peregrinations earned him the nickname “Air Miles Andy,” and he was severely criticized for his contacts with unsavory dictators in places like Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, not to mention the American billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, who had served time in prison for pedophilia. Reporters routinely questioned the value of Andrew’s unsalaried role, which cost the British government nearly £600,000 annually for overseas travel, hotels, and entertaining— plus his £249,000 annual allowance from the Queen to run his private office. (pg 508)
Okay, so many things here. You don't get imprisoned for "pedophilia", you get imprisoned for child molestation and rape, as well as child exploitation. At the time of this book's publication (2012), Epstein was convicted of procuring a child for prostitution and of soliciting a prostitute (those terms used as that's the conviction).
He had grown more comfortable in his own skin and committed himself to establishing his legacy through the job that, as he frequently said, “I made up as I went along.” “He has made a full life for himself,” said Nancy Reagan. “He does so much more than any previous Prince of Wales.” Yet his approach to his role is diametrically opposed to his mother’s more deliberate operation at Buckingham Palace. Much of what the
Queen does she is advised to do, while her firstborn son tends to do mainly what he wants to. Charles “is
high octane because he is so driven,” said one of his aides. “He is always at full tilt.” (pg 511)
And here the author continues to make a play for Charles.
No one would deny that the Queen sets high standards for her household, but Charles is more extravagant. Elizabeth II knows what everything costs and economizes when necessary. Guests at routine Buckingham Palace receptions are served wine, potato chips, and nuts, while at Clarence House they get gourmet hors
d’oeuvres, and the dinner parties have elaborate floral displays and theatrical lighting. “It is fair to say when
he feels something should be done well, he doesn’t stint,” said Patricia Brabourne. When he goes to stay at Sandringham for a week on his own, Charles brings along vans filled with vegetables and meats from Highgrove, even though there is a farm on the Norfolk estate. At dinner parties, he is known to eat a different meal from his guests, sometimes with his personal cutlery.
Such behavior may seem persnickety and spoiled, but Charles has a capacity for empathy that was underestimated in the Diana era. His ability to engage with people is “as good if not better than the Queen,” said a former courtier. “He has natural warmth with the Queen’s sense of duty and Philip’s ability to make a guy laugh.” He is more imaginative and intuitive as well, and his thoughtfulness is legendary. When Anne Glenconner’s sister got cancer, Charles wrote her a seventeen-page letter with ideas about alternative treatments. (pg 512)
He's not a frivolous petty spoiled bore! He's a victim of Diana! Funny how Diana's empathy is calculated for optics but Charles's is genuine.
Handsome and tall like his mother (at six foot three, he towers over the rest of the Windsors), he embodies her magic in his informal and accessible personality, irreverent humor, and high-wattage smile. Like his father, he engages people with a steady gaze and speaks with poise, conviction, and sensitivity. He lacks the deep-seated insecurities and attention-craving impulses of Diana and the old-fashioned formality and awkward mannerisms of Charles. He has his mother’s soulful eyes, and his father’s thinning hair. He projects confidence without arrogance, although he shows a streak of willfulness that can be traced to both parents. “The future could not be more optimistic,” said Malcolm Ross. “William is stunning, very sensible, incredibly polite, and very, very good with people." (pg 523 and 524)
And a plea for William with a dig at Diana. What a fitting quote to be the final of this dreadful book.
Final Grade: F
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