She’s bossed the ‘Firm’ for nearly 70 years, but as she approaches her 100th birthday, how far should we venerate the Queen Mother? Anthony Holden Codenamed Operation Lion, a classified document planning the Queen Mother’s obsequies has been kicking around Whitehall for decades, constantly in need of revision as the fortunes of the monarchy faltered. The original in my possession, dating from the mid-Nineties, envisaged four days lying-in-state at the Palace of Westminster, followed by the biggest state funeral since Winston Churchill’s in 1965. Television would “go to black” as national life ground to a halt for a week or more in a nervous attempt to re-cement the monarchy’s position at the heart of British life with a full-scale re-enactment of VE Day.
In the early Nineties, soon after the queen’s annus horribilis but long before Diana’s death, I took part in a top-secret, all-day BBC rehearsal for the “Solemn But Inevitable Day” referred to only in the most hushed of tones. All normal programming was assumed “cancelled” as Television Centre at White City was given over for an entire Sunday to “live” updates from a sombre-voiced Jennie Bond outside Clarence House, amid copious footage of the Blitz as black-tied studio pundits debated with Peter Sissons the significance of the deceased to the British 20th century. It was hard, frankly, to come up with much. I listened with disbelief as a woman who had never done a day’s work in her life, who had blithely run up eight-figure overdrafts of the taxpayers’ money on racehorses, had four palatial residences, 50 full-time servants and the pampered life of a latter-day Marie-Antoinette, was credited with winning World War II singlehanded.
“Now we can look the East End in the face,” the Queen Mother’s much-quoted remark on surveying the rubble of a bombed wing of Buckingham Palace, served as a mantra of her pearly-queen hold over millions. I was not encouraged to quote the wry remark recently made to me by one disaffected courtier: “She wouldn’t even know where the East End was.” So I was heartened but unsurprised last week when Channel 4 chose to risk some home truths about the Queen Mother on the eve of her 100th birthday. Even back then, before John Major’s diehard monarchists gave way to Tony Blair’s closet republicans, before Diana’s abrupt demise poleaxed the people and put the wind up the Windsors, senior BBC executives realised that its plans for black-framed screens, half-mast flags and solemn music reeked absurdly of a Reithian Britain that no longer exists, of an unassailably secure monarchy uncritically beloved of its subjects. ITV (let alone Channel 4) would be taking a much more realistic approach – snappy documentary footage and respectful but objective assessments amid top-rated shows proceeding as usual – and so stealing the audience. The BBC’s plans, like Operation Lion, were hastily sent back to the drawing board.
Then came Diana’s death, precipitating some of the most dramatic scenes ever relayed by British television, and the general assumption that in death the people’s princess had finally managed to upstage the grand old lady – her own grandmother’s best friend – with whom she shared a strong mutual antipathy. “The chief leper in the leper colony,” was how the princess once described to me over a gossipy lunch the woman Cecil Beaton had once called “everyone’s favourite granny”. But Diana’s memory soon faded, thanks to sly co-operation between a newly slick Buckingham Palace public relations machine and a disappointingly craven Downing Street, too timid to take on the monarchy as New Labour concentrated from day one on re-election.
The Westminster Abbey heroics of Diana’s brother, Charles Spencer, were cancelled out by his own seamy divorce, then his shameless commercial exploitation of her memory, before Britain gingerly began to re-examine itself, wondering quite what all the fuss had been about. As the Queen Mother soldiered gamely on, British life soon returned to normal, with her 1998 hip operation leading the BBC news as the government contemplated war with Iraq. For the Windsors, too, it was soon back to business as usual – Charles now free to consort openly with Camilla Parker-Bowles; William foxhunting in chip-off-the-old- block defiance of government policy and public opinion; the ageing queen scowling at new labour’s jazzed-up version of her national anthem. When their private yacht was decommissioned – a floating embassy for Britain, if you believed Tory election propaganda – the Windsors publicly shed the tears they had failed to find for the princess (supposedly because they were not given to public shows of emotion). Spared Diana’s populist antics, the ex-officio first family could return to being their true selves, scarcely bothering to conceal their contempt for the focus groups and phony photo opportunities – partying with pop stars, dropping in on pubs and council houses – laid on by the government’s eager- beaver spin-doctors. Which is why, amid pomp and pageantry marking their matriarch’s centenary, the Windsors should not take undue heart from the touching outpourings of affection due any human being on his or her 100th birthday, let alone the glutinous “God Bless You, Ma’am” forelock-tugging of the tabloids and the Daily Telegraph. Nor are courtiers too thrilled with Blair for turning down the touching notion that her 100th birthday should be declared a national holiday. These are signs of the times that are furrowing palace brows as Operation Lion is scaled down yet again. Come that day, the Queen Mother’s demise will turn out to be an even more pivotal moment than Diana’s for the antique, irrational, ever more incongruous institution of hereditary monarchy. The widow of the wartime King George VI symbolised a moment in British history when this feudal tomfoolery was at its most deceptively potent. Without her, the bedraggled rump she leaves behind will be revealed for what it is – a spoilt, selfish bunch of interlopers, who have long since outstayed their welcome, holding Britain back from its potentially dynamic European future by encouraging it to cling, heedlessly and extravagantly, to decayed dreams of its imperial past, personified these days primarily by arrogant, xenophobic, football hooligans abroad. The irony, of course, is that the former Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, beloved by millions for reasons they themselves cannot quite articulate or understand, has always been the most spoilt and selfish of the lot. The daughter of a hereditary earl, just like Diana, she took a somewhat different approach to her marital good fortune, milking it for all the creature comforts with few of the responsibilities, fixing her eye on the throne as soon as her husband’s older brother looked like putting love before duty and crowding her unfortunate young daughters’ freedom of movement after her husband’s premature death.
The young Miss Bowes-Lyon may have twice turned down proposals of marriage from the sweet, stammering, but unprepossessing Duke of York, but her eventual acceptance of his royal hand soon revealed quite as much flint as warmth in that celebrated heart of gold.
Luckily for her, Lady Elizabeth married one of the few Windsor men never to look at another woman, so she was spared the heartache endured with averted eyes by most of the “married” (as opposed to “born”) royals of generations both before and after her. She was unarguably the making of the reluctant King George VI, visibly (and self-confessedly) terrified as he was pitchforked on to the throne by his brother’s abdication. With clinical determination, she organised the curing of his stammer and stage-managed his stand beside Churchill as a symbol of Britain’s fortitude during the nightmare of protracted war.
Amid the national crisis, it was swiftly forgotten that the pre-war king and queen had been devout appeasers, responsible for the most unconstitutional act of the century when they endorsed Neville Chamberlain and his Munich Agreement by escorting him on to the balcony of Buckingham Palace. And that the belligerent Churchill was the last man they wanted to see succeed him. Their swift change of political horses remains, of course, the reason why the generation that fought so manfully in that war always nursed the kind of devotion for the Queen Mother normally reserved by British manhood for its nannies or school matrons. This is why they chose to overlook her conspicuous human failings: her stubbornly cruel treatment of Wallis Simpson, “the woman who killed my husband”; her wilful burial of her head in the sand during the domestic dramas of her own dysfunctional family; her key role in the casting of the Charles-Diana soap opera which brought the institution of monarchy to its knees. On August 4 1900, this future queen- empress entered an already sepia world as another, Victoria, lay dying. Ladysmith had been relieved in February, and Mafeking in May.
Victoria’s favourite prime minister turned around her rampant unpopularity, for living off the Civil List despite withdrawing from public life after her husband’s early death, by casting her as the empress of a quarter of the world’s population. Britain’s imperial pride was suddenly embodied in this frail, old woman with the trumped-up title. Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon’s father had handy connections at court. She was the ninth child of Claud, Lord Glamis, heir to the Earl of Strathmore and Lord- Lieutenant of Angus, a typical, old-school patrician of the period, said to hide a kind heart behind his gruff exterior and walrus moustache. As influential in the shaping of their youngest daughter’s character was her mother, the former Celia Cavendish- Bentinck, kinswoman to the Duke of Portland. With the outbreak of World War I, on Elizabeth’s 14th birthday, Celia converted the family’s ancestral Scottish pile, Glamis Castle, into a convalescent hospital.
To the young Elizabeth, who combined her education in the social graces with cheering up the patients, the war meant “knitting, knitting, knitting”. Thanks to her mother’s example, she developed a brand of noblesse oblige that has stood her in good stead ever since, somehow persuading her social inferiors that, as toffs go, she was “all right”. The pretty young aristocrat was able to enjoy five post-war years of the London debutante’s life, including several racy love affairs, before marrying the shy, gauche Duke of York, second son of King George V, in April 1923. Their wedding in Westminster Abbey was the first there of a monarch’s son since that of the future Richard II to Princess Anne of Bohemia more than 500 years before – thus establishing another 20th-century myth, serially exploited by the Windsors, that royal nuptials must always be marked by glorious public ceremonies worthy of national holidays.
At the time, a daring proposal from the BBC that the service be broadcast was vetoed by the dean and chapter of Westminster on the grounds that “people might hear it while sitting in public houses, with their hats on”. Times change, and with them, when it can no longer avoid it, the monarchy. The sequence of events leading to Edward VIII’s abdication in 1936 sparked a crisis that might have proved terminal, were it not for rather more important distractions in Europe.
The rise of Adolf Hitler, to whom the exiled Duke of Windsor was soon making advances, proved the unlikely salvation of the family business he had so damaged. The cosy institution of the “family monarchy” now reached its zenith with portraits of the new queen pouring tea for her husband and daughters, for all the world as if they were just another English family, keeping the national upper lip stiff in the face of a common enemy. That war may have seen the rebirth of the monarchy as an institution around which an embattled nation could rally, but it also sealed the demise of the empire that had underpinned it. For 50 more years, bowler- hatted stiffs and horny-handed sons of toil were strangely united in seeing the monarchy as a symbol of a bygone Britain of which they were reluctant to let go, a Britannia that, however unwilling they were to admit it, no longer ruled the waves. It was a Britain implicitly symbolised by the traditional, beyond-reproach figure of the seemingly eternal Queen Mother. Even when the younger royals began to discredit their elders, she somehow survived as a symbol of moral probity, above the fray, seemingly let down, no doubt mortally embarrassed by it all. Yet much of the blame can be laid at her firmly closed door.
The seeds of the royal implosion of the Nineties were sown long before, in the stubborn attempts of a blinkered, aristocratic, ultra-traditionalist mother to maintain class rubrics long past their sell-by date. Soon after her husband’s premature death in 1952, aged only 56, the new Queen Mother’s younger daughter fell in love with the devoted aide her late husband had fondly called “the son I never had”. Group Captain Peter Townsend was in the throes of a divorce, a word then so taboo at court that divorc’s were not permitted to enter the royal enclosure at Ascot. No matter that there was no adultery involved; Townsend’s marriage had faltered because of the long hours he spent at the palace, night after night, in the devoted service of the then king and queen. Margaret’s mother wasn’t having it. Beyond the dread spectre of divorce, of far more significance to this royal arriviste was the fact that Townsend had been a palace equerry, the king’s aide-de-camp. Her daughter, in her eyes, wanted to marry a member of staff, an insupportable notion. Far from telling her so herself, she added to the burden of the young new queen by instructing her to forbid her sister to marry the man she loved.
Margaret bit the bullet and embarked on a notoriously wayward life as the requisite royal black sheep, only spared years later by the arrival of Sarah Ferguson. With due irony, Margaret was eventually permitted to divorce the far less-suitable man she married instead, the bohemian photographer Tony Armstrong-Jones (duly ennobled as Lord Snowdon). Consider the effect on any family, especially one whose patriarch has recently died, when the widow inserts an immediate, lifelong wedge between her only two daughters with so stern and heartless a diktat. But the “imperial ostrich” syndrome, as some of her staff called the Queen Mother’s reluctance to take responsibility for the results of her own brutal rulings, resurfaced again when Margaret eventually divorced Snowdon – and when Charles’s marriage began to falter. The match between her favourite grandson and the granddaughter of her closest friend, Lady Ruth Fermoy, was one the Queen Mother herself promoted, purely to see off the rival forces of her Greek-born son-in- law’s dynastically ambitious uncle, Lord Louis Mountbatten. The bisexual old seadog wanted Charles to marry his own granddaughter, Amanda Knatchbull, a pretty, demure, intelligent girl who would have been a much more suitable wife for the agonised, introspective heir to the throne. She might even have won him away from Camilla and so spared his mother a lot of grief, not to mention a constitutional crisis still waiting to happen. But it was not to be. The Queen Mother and her crony, so intent on her social connections as to have testified against her own daughter during her child-custody suit with Earl “Johnny” Spencer, promoted a match both knew to be inappropriate. Thus was the teenage bride dispatched, in her own poignant words, “like a lamb to the slaughter”.
When Charles duly betrayed her best friend’s granddaughter, continuing his affair with a fellow officer’s wife before, during and after their marriage, the Queen Mother betrayed all her apparent principles by condoning her grandson’s adultery and taking his side against the girl she had trapped into marrying him. The heartlessness of her behaviour, her lack of sympathy for a fragile young woman who was never given the slightest chance, remains hard to square with the twinkling image of kindly moral rectitude so readily accepted by the world at large. No wonder postmarital Diana could not bear to be in the same room as the woman who had locked her in that gilded cage and thrown away the key.
The former queen’s ruthless streak was evident from the first, in her treatment of the Duchess of Windsor, whom she refused to receive even after the Duke’s death, despite the diplomatic pleas of her own daughter (and monarch). For half a century after her own husband’s death, in Clarence House, Windsor Lodge, Birkhall and the Castle of Mey, the widowed “Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother” did not merely invent herself a title boasting two queens to her daughter’s one. She preserved an otherwise vanished way of life befitting the last empress she had once been: a code founded on class distinction and cushioned by a life of profligate comfort at the expense of the taxpayer, to whom, it seemed unfathomably, the old dear could do no wrong. Only octogenarians can still, perhaps, remember the Queen Mother as a middle-aged woman, stately before her time. Just as Diana will always be preserved in the memory in the full flush of youth, so the Queen Mother has always been a venerable old lady in the mind of most Britons, even those now past retirement age. It helped insulate her from criticism during prolonged open season on the rest of her family.
But the crisis for the monarchy waiting to be precipitated by her eventual death will go way beyond the all too familiar, all too sordid dirty royal linen remorselessly paraded in recent years. The demise of the last queen-empress, etched in its potent symbolism by the gaunt cast of royal characters she will leave behind, will challenge Blair and his brave new Britain to re-evaluate itself yet again, to ask one more time what kind of country it wants to be. Can a prime minister who has finally flushed hereditary peers out of Parliament, amid complaints only about his plans for replacing them, seriously consider continuing to prop up a hereditary monarchy deprived of its last, most potent symbol, however illusory, of some sort of state of divine grace? Might not the self- styled “radical” Blair, like the vast majority of his backbenchers and fellow countrymen, apply his own democratic logic to the office of head of state? The same arguments will undoubtedly pursue him all the way to Buckingham Palace and beyond.
Soon that debate will begin again in earnest, with the monarchy exposed to searching evaluation, deprived of the suspension of critical faculties the Queen Mother has so long inspired. Once her mother is no longer around to corner the role of royal matriarch, the elderly queen herself will at last be perceived as the hidebound old lady she has imperceptibly become, intent on seeing out her reign without passing the baton to a gauche, adulterous, unpopular son with whom she herself is now at times in conflict. Soon the cracks in the Windsor edifice will begin to widen, offering reformers a long-awaited chance to free Britain of the unelected princelings barring the way to a truly popular democracy and rendering the country a risible Ruritanian theme-park in the eyes of the free world. No one is suggesting that the queen herself be ejected from the throne, just as her mother was so dramatically pitchforked on to it. With a discredited heir, however, and emotionally bruised grandchildren, who might just wind up sharing their contemporaries’ bemused embarrassment at all things hereditary, not least a job apparently prone to ruining people’s lives, a re-elected Blair – with a reduced majority and no new ideas – may well find his backbenchers finally giving voice to the growing tide of public opinion that it is, at last, time for Britain to grow up, take real pride in its cultural heritage and sweep away this 1E000-year-old barrier to social progress. Suddenly, in the unaccustomed absence of her indestructible mother, the present queen’s own death may well come to seem the right moment to dispense with all this antique flummery, retire the rest of the royals with due dignity, and give Britain the chance to face the 21st century as the genuinely modernised democracy Blair has so long said he wants. It would be a fitting legacy for the last queen-empress.