Sally Smith: Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

The Queen leaving the Belgian Embassy in London, 1963. Reginald Davis MBE (London)

Copyright © 2012 by Sally Bedell Smith

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

From “The Opening of Parliament,”

MARY WILSON,

wife of Harold Wilson,

Prime Minister, 1964–70 and 1974–76

They love her for her wisdom and her pride ,

Her friendship and her quiet majesty;

And soon the streets of Britain will be thronged

With crowds rejoicing in her Jubilee

But as the cool unfaltering voice reads on ,

A different picture forms upon the air—

A small quick figure, walking all alone

Across a glen studded with standing deer …

She notes a crumbling wall, an open gate ,

With countrywoman’s eyes she views the scene;

Yet, walking free upon her own estate

Still, in her solitude, she is the Queen

“She sort of expands when she laughs .

She laughs with her whole face.”

Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, in New Brunswick, Canada, during her Golden Jubilee celebrations, October 2002. Norm Betts/Rex USA

PREFACE

AT THE END OF THE WEDDING OF PRINCE WILLIAM AND CATHERINE Middleton on April 29, 2011, the radiant couple turned before walking down the aisle at Westminster Abbey and stood before his grandparents, Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. The newlyweds were celebrated for their romantic love match, and for the young prince’s determination to marry his soul mate despite her being a “commoner”—having neither royal nor aristocratic origins. The bride and groom gave a low curtsy and neck bow to the Queen, who looked sturdy and stoic at age eighty-five. She signaled her approval with an almost imperceptible nod.

Seventy-two years earlier the Queen had made a similarly independent decision about love. When she was only thirteen, on the first afternoon she spent with eighteen-year-old Prince Philip of Greece, a strikingly handsome but impecunious British naval officer in training, Elizabeth fell in love. Eight years later they married under the same Gothic arches of Westminster Abbey. While everything else in the life of Lilibet, as she was called, was laid out for her, she made the most important decision on her own, against the wishes of her mother, who preferred a titled English aristocrat. “She never looked at anyone else,” said Elizabeth’s cousin Margaret Rhodes.

It was a sign of remarkable certitude on the part of then-Princess Elizabeth, not to mention strength and confidence in a girl so young. But that unwavering decision is just one of many surprising aspects I discovered about the woman who has reigned for sixty years as Queen of the United Kingdom of England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, along with fifteen other realms and fourteen territories around the world. Her role and how she manages to perform it seemed to me to defy rational explanation: a hereditary position consecrated by God, embodying a multicultural and multifaith nation far different from the homogenous land ruled by her predecessors over the thousand-year history of the British monarchy. I understood that much of her life is ceremonial, an unvarying routine of yearly set pieces that date from the time of Queen Victoria. 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.

In her epic life, the Queen has played her part like a great actress—the only person about whom it can truly be said that all the world is a stage. Billions have watched her evolve from a beautiful ingenue to a businesslike working mother to a wise grandmother. When she was twenty-eight years old and had been on the throne for three years, her first private secretary, Sir Alan Lascelles, said, “People will not realize for years how intelligent she is.… Eventually it will become an accepted national fact.” Yet while her public persona conveys gravitas, she has concealed much of that intelligence, much of her personality and humor. Behind her enigmatic and dignified facade resides a largely unknown woman.

“Her private side took me totally by surprise,” said Howard Morgan, an artist who painted the Queen’s portrait in the 1980s. “She talks like an Italian. She waves her hands about. She is enormously expressive.” Friends and family have often witnessed the joie de vivre seldom seen in public—blowing bubbles during a birthday party at the London Aquarium, belting out songs while perched atop a wooden box on an island in the Outer Hebrides, jumping up to serve the American artist George “Frolic” Weymouth from the buffet in a dining room at Windsor Castle. “She stacked the plates!” Weymouth recalled, “which is what we were taught never to do when we were growing up.”

During informal conversation her eyes sparkle, her voice is merry and warm. “You can hear her laughter sometimes throughout the house,” said Tony Parnell, the former foreman at Sandringham, the monarch’s estate in Norfolk. “It is a joyous laugh.”

At five foot four, the Queen’s small stature is another surprise to people seeing her for the first time. Yet like her great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria, who barely reached five feet, she has the kind of bearing that makes her size beside the point. She emphasizes her authority by walking at what her longtime dress designer Norman Hartnell called her “intentionally measured and deliberate pace.”

Equally paradoxical is the Queen’s becoming humility, a trait inculcated in her early years. “She can uphold the identity of herself as Queen and still be humble,” said Margaret Rhodes. “Her inner modesty stops her getting spoiled.” When the Queen goes to the theater she tries to arrive unannounced after the house lights have gone down. One of her former private secretaries described how odd it was “to watch her sidle into a room.… She doesn’t ever try to make an entrance.” If someone else is being celebrated, she effortlessly slips into the background. When her cousin Lady Mary Clayton had her ninetieth birthday party in December 2007, a caricaturist memorialized the occasion with a cartoon. Mary’s figure is the largest, in the center, while the bespectacled Queen is tucked in among the others in the last row.

While known for her caution, Elizabeth II refuses to wear a hard hat when riding on horseback—for a practical reason, it turns out—prompting the staff at Windsor Castle to joke that “the only thing that comes between the Queen and her heir is an Hermès scarf.” Nor does she use a seat belt in her cars, and she drives on the private roads of her estates “like a bat out of hell,” said Margaret Rhodes.

Even her eyebrows remain defiantly untamed. A quarter century ago biographer Elizabeth Longford first recognized the Queen’s no-nonsense integrity in those natural brows, which added “interest and character to the face” and made it “a living record rather than a meaningless statement.”