A Brief History of the Private Life of Elizabeth II (3 page)

She has never gone to school, never done housework or even her own packing, never carried or seriously handled money (the banknote she puts in a church collection is passed to her by an
Equerry). All of these things are, of course, a result of her position. Even the circumstances in which she must take her chances with fate, however, have gone without a hitch. Every one of her
children and grandchildren has been born healthy. She herself has never known a day’s serious illness. Although she fell in love with the first eligible man she encountered, at an age when it
might have been argued that she could not have known her own mind, she has been happily married to him for her entire adult life. She has never experienced frustrated love, nor the pain of divorce,
though her sister – sadly – knew both.

However rarefied the world in which she moves, the Queen has, to a larger extent than people perhaps realise, participated in the events of the 20th century. Her exalted
position does not guard her against the slings and arrows of fortune. Given the long military tradition of her family, her male relatives have seen their share of danger. Her father was at the
Battle of Jutland. Her future husband – of whom at that time she was already fond – saw action in the Mediterranean and risked his life on the convoys. Her second son was in the
Falklands campaign, and more recently her grandson Prince Harry served for 10 weeks in Afghanistan. One of her mother’s brothers was killed in the First World War, and another was a POW. Her
uncle, the Duke of Kent, was killed in the Second World War while aboard an RAF aircraft. Even in peacetime there have been tragedies: her cousin, Prince William of Gloucester, also perished in an
air crash, in 1972. Her husband’s uncle, Lord Mountbatten, was murdered by IRA terrorists in 1979. She and her parents lived through the Blitz, in which their London home – Buckingham
Palace – was deliberately targeted by the Luftwaffe and badly damaged.

She and her family are familiar with stress and danger, and her life has contained plenty of anxious, awful moments. Apart from these extreme circumstances, she has known the trauma of her three
eldest children’s unhappy marriages, and periodic pressure to make household economies, since her finances are often commented upon in the media. She has even, despite the presence of
policemen, Household regiments and all manner of ceremonial bodyguards to protect her, awoken to find a prowler in her bedroom. Although the scale of her surroundings may be beyond comparison with
that of most of her subjects, she too has been subject to adversity.

In spite of the affection with which the public regards her, she has not been able to enjoy the luxury of complacency. IRA terrorism posed a considerable threat to the Royal Family from the
early 1970s onward. Even before that she had faced
the possibility of violent unrest, from Welsh nationalists at the time of her son’s investiture as Prince of Wales
(their bombing campaign, minuscule in comparison with what came later, is largely forgotten today), or from Quebec separatists who booed her – and might have done much worse – when she
visited Canada in the 1960s. ‘Danger,’ she once said, ‘is part of the job,’ and she refuses to let the prospect of assassination interrupt her routine. No matter what layers
of security exist between the Queen and the public, she has to have more personal, physical courage than many people realise or appreciate – as was seen in 1981, when a young man fired shots
at her as she rode along the Mall.

Her position requires her to be on show, to move among crowds, and therefore to be vulnerable to the shouted insults of drunks or to the assassin’s bullet, but she has long since weighed
up the risks and decided that she will carry on regardless. On occasion an entire visit has been advised against by the Foreign Office because the host country was deemed too unstable to protect
her. This was the case with Ghana in 1958 as guest of the unpopular Kwame Nkrumah. Sitting next to him in a dozen places, she could be injured by some attempt on him. The Queen, overruling her
advisors, insisted on going. ‘How silly I should look,’ she told them, ‘if I was scared to visit and then Khrushchev went and had a good reception.’ She returned safely, and
the tour was a great success. The fact that she has always been sanguine in the face of potential danger is, perhaps, not the least impressive of her qualities.

There are different kinds of courage, and she must have several of them. The Queen lives on a constant and unrelenting diet of bad tidings. She watches the news like the rest of us, but she
often knows more than we do. During the Cold War she will have had far greater knowledge of the dangers to peace – and the risk of nuclear annihilation – than her people. Imagine the
stress her position must have involved during the crises over Berlin and Cuba. Yet through it all she maintained
an apparently genuine sense of calm, and carried on with her
job, including the archaic ceremonial, as if nothing were amiss. Murders, terrorist outrages, natural disasters at home or in the Commonwealth and beyond – all these are reported to her
because there is often something official she is required to do, such as sending condolences or expressing the nation’s sorrow. As already seen, when visiting an American city she met the
families of those killed by a frenzied gunman. Whatever can you say to console
one
person in those circumstances, let alone a whole series of grieving relatives? It cannot have been easy,
and they were not even her subjects, yet she did it.

Suppose that, like her grandfather George V in the years between the wars, she feels that society is going to the dogs. This is distinctly possible, given that she is an elderly lady of
traditional bent who has very high personal standards of morals and integrity. She not only cannot publicly disapprove of things, she may be obliged to sign the very legislation that legalises what
was previously unacceptable. This takes courage too. As one of her Private Secretaries, Sir John Colville, put it: ‘By sheer strength of willpower the Queen controls the impatience she must
often feel, and never fails to look imperturbable. Nothing is better calculated to win the esteem of her subjects.’ Besides courage, she has several advantages that have helped to make her
the effective ruler she is. The first was training, the second was temperament, the third was routine and the fourth was advice.

From the age of 10 – when her uncle abdicated – she was intensively schooled for the position she would occupy. She worked very closely with her father, whose style and tastes she
consciously continued, and in the early part of her own reign used many of the same advisors and officials. She and her father had had, in fact, the same tutor – Queen Mary (1867–1953),
redoubtable widow of King George V, who trained them rigorously in the correct performance of duty. Once described as ‘the most queenly of queens’, Mary’s rigid bearing can be
seen at a glance in old photographs. She was expert in protocol and appropriate behaviour, instilling an indelible sense of service by which personal wishes, and feelings,
were entirely secondary to the demands of duty, just as she educated her granddaughter to appreciate the cultural riches that make up the Royal Collections. It is worth remembering that this
influence was directed at Elizabeth for the first 25 years of her life, and will have taken on added importance when she became heir – a thorough and intensive indoctrination of a willing
pupil who responded by modelling herself on the old lady. If a certain toughness of character has been passed on, that is hardly surprising. What she also inherited, however, was a lifelong
awareness of the need to justify her position by hard work and goodwill.

Elizabeth was also, and more specifically, taught by her father. Having had no preparation for his own succession, he wanted to ensure that she was fully ready for hers. Queen Victoria would not
let her eldest son see the contents of dispatch boxes; George VI habitually sent for his daughter to go through his with him. The first time she took the salute at Trooping the Colour he gave her a
rigorous inspection of uniform and drill before she left the Palace. From her mother’s example she learned how to charm – how to talk easily to others – even though her own
personality did not enable her to do this so effectively. Everywhere around her were mentors, teachers, examples. She grasped the importance of what she was doing, and strove to do it well. The
Queen’s formative years were, of course, interrupted by the Second World War. Because she did not attend school or university, it might be assumed that she lacks the intellectual discipline
to analyse and retain information. In fact, she was soundly, privately educated in the subjects – history and constitutional law, for instance – that had bearing on her future. She may
not have had the stimulus of a school environment, or the spur of examinations or of competition with other pupils, but she had the benefit
of one-to-one tuition and her
intellectual training, if limited in scope, was excellent. Because she came to the throne when young, she has also had the experience of learning her job by doing it.

Her second advantage was temperament. It is a point worth emphasising that Elizabeth never had what might be called a ‘Prince Hal phase’, in which she rebelled against her upbringing
or her destiny. She accepted it and prepared for it and looked forward to it. Her views never clashed with those of her family or the people who sought to train her. While her uncle David, as King
Edward VIII, often ignored the red dispatch boxes sent to him by the government, Queen Elizabeth makes a point of reading everything in hers, going through them for an hour or two each evening.
Through concentration and long practice she can absorb and retain large amounts of information and weigh its implications. The Queen has an extremely good memory for both facts and faces. On
subjects that engage her interest, such as art and antiques, she has amassed considerable knowledge. On the breeding, training and racing of horses, her lifelong enthusiasm, she has a level of
expertise that is overwhelming.

Although these are leisure interests, her grasp of social and political matters is just as detailed. The politician Tony Benn, no admirer of monarchy, said of her: ‘She is not very clever
but is remarkably intelligent.’ She is not clever in the sense of being widely read, but is extremely well-versed in matters that relate to her role. With her powerful memory, she can also
quickly ‘mug up’ on a matter in order to discuss it. And there are subjects she has studied in detail over long years. For someone who cannot vote, for example, she has an intense
knowledge of the British electoral system, the state of the parties, and the personalities in the Commons. She studies all the documents she is given by advisors, and retains a surprising amount of
what she reads. She can grasp essentials, reel off statistics, recall past conversations. This is a matter of
memory. Although there is an agenda for discussion during her
weekly meetings with the Premier, no one has seen the Queen taking notes, and by custom no written record is ever kept of these. She need not pay such close attention, for after all she cannot
alter anything that Parliament has decided, but she considers all this information useful. She has an instinct borne of long practice for knowing how the British people will react to things –
reading their mood, taking the temperature – and she can use this to give advice.

Dealing, over decades, with the leaders of other countries and the prime ministers of her own has given her a wealth of experience that aids her judgement. Not only that, but she has personal
associations with a huge array of world statesmen, and can counsel politicians to whom these people are only names. It is a long-established cliché that she can catch out government
ministers by knowing more than they do about a specific subject, or embarrass them with questions they cannot answer. This is something of a game. She has been quietly scoring points in the same
way ever since her audiences were with Winston Churchill, and her father did it too. It is somewhat unfair, for she is now vastly more experienced than any of her politicians and has discussed
similar, or the same, issues with their predecessors-in-office, literally for generations. It must also be borne in mind that she has far greater opportunities to see the wider picture than her
ministers do. ‘She has sources of information that no one else has,’ as one observer put it. Much that goes on in Whitehall is seen on a ‘need to know’ basis, but the Queen
can see everything. Even without her special access, she learns much simply by doing her homework. She is always, in a phrase used about barristers, ‘on top of her brief’, and this is
not easy considering the fact that all areas of national and commonwealth life come within the scope of her job.

From formal meetings and stilted small talk she can extract a surprising amount of useful knowledge. President Bill Clinton noticed this, recalling that: ‘I was taken with the clever
manner
in which she discussed public issues, probing me for information without venturing too far into expressing her own political views.’ He added: ‘She
impressed me as someone who might have become a successful politician or diplomat. As it was she had to be both, without seeming to be either.’ This is a very eloquent summing-up of her
role.

At conferences of Commonwealth heads of government she will have a private audience with each of them. In the space of a few minutes she can discuss the issues facing Australia, both listening
and advising, and then go on to do the same for Tuvalu or Mozambique. Her dispatch boxes, after all, contain papers relating not only to the governance of Britain. They also include reams of
confidential information about the countries of the Commonwealth. From the Dominions, she also receives reports from the Governors-General that even the prime ministers do not see. And she is
extremely observant. Schooled by a long lifetime of protocol and formality, she knows exactly how things should be done and will quickly notice any mistakes, whether it be a diplomat wearing an
order incorrectly, cutlery laid in the wrong manner at a banquet, or a soldier fumbling a drill-movement. Moreover she will notice, and remember, individual faces in a crowd – on the first
tour of Canada after her accession she recognised, from her previous visit three years earlier, one of the mounties guarding her, and greeted him warmly. Although she can be critical when she feels
dignity has been undermined, she is usually sympathetic – and even heartily amused – if some much-rehearsed event goes awry, for it adds excitement to duties that are otherwise
predictable. When igniting the first of the chain of bonfires on a rainy evening at Windsor to celebrate her Silver Jubilee, the torch failed to stay alight and then the beacon erupted into flame
before she could reach it. ‘Oh good, what fun!’ was her comment.