Reading the well-known English satirist Craig Brown’s latest book, A Voyage around the Queen, I’m struck again by how, in terms of symbolic theatre, republics pale beside the multifaceted events and dramas that swirl around a monarchy. Brown offers us a stunningly enjoyable six hundred or so pages covering anything and everything he considers relevant to Queen Elizabeth II’s seventy-year reign.
I cannot, of course, evoke this brick-like book in its entirety; others will make their own journeys. All I can mention are various vignettes and anecdotes that, haphazardly, interested me as I read. (There is no index to help the explorer of the text.)
I’ll begin with a moving scene concerning Anne Frank and her family, who were hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam. In the bedroom she shared with her older sister Margot from 1942, the pictures Anne used to decorate the wall included two little black-and-white photos of Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret. Betrayed to the police in 1944, Anne and Margot died in Bergen-Belsen in 1945. The Queen heard about those photos in 1974, and when she eventually visited Bergen-Belsen in June 2015 to commemorate the British soldiers who had helped liberate the camp, she also walked to the memorial gravestone to Margot Frank, 1926–45, and Anne Frank, 1929–45, and bowed her head in homage.
Among the Queen’s habits, vagaries, encounters, and enthusiasms (she liked the sound of bagpipes and carried with her a little bag for her lipstick) we learn of her encounter with Marilyn Monroe. In England to shoot The Prince and the Showgirl with Laurence Olivier, Monroe was accompanied by her husband, the dramatist Arthur Miller, who later recalled that she was “sewn into a spectacular red velvet dress with a Gay Nineties look.” Queen Elizabeth, Brown notes, arrived in a black evening gown, long white gloves and a diamond-and-emerald tiara. Anxious, taking deep breaths, sucking on her lips, Marilyn was about to meet one of the few women in the world more famous than herself. The Queen later recalled that Monroe was “very sweet” but she “felt sorry for her, because she was so nervous that she had licked all her lipstick off.”
The Queen made everyone nervous. When she attended comedies at the theatre, Brown reports, actors bravely trying to provoke laughter were met with silence, the audiences transfixed by Her Majesty.
Well-known literary and cultural figures were mesmerised too, even those who noisily proclaimed their republicanism. Australian novelist Patrick White, who would win the Nobel Prize in 1973, provided a comedy of sorts. Craggy (there’s a photo), prickly and notably anti-monarchist, White was invited to lunch on the Royal Yacht Britannia when it docked in Sydney in 1963. In a letter to a cousin in England he explained that he first decided not to go, then changed his mind so he could observe how the “colonial notorieties” reacted to being there, and then boasted of having been invited as a “serious writer,” perhaps the first ever. He boarded in “fear and trembling” but then realised his fellow guests were “even more nervous” than he was. Later he took to excoriating the Queen in extreme terms.
Twice we see the Queen running, in both cases prompted by her famous love of horses. Brown feels that her passion for horse-racing was liberating; she could be “spontaneous, excitable and competitive,” taking a break from her “meticulously planned and regimented existence,” for horse-racing is “fast, random, and unpredictable.” Her passion for racing “never waned, right up to her dying day.”
But the ability of her horses to compete appeared to be threatened in the late 1980s when her trainer Dick Hern broke his neck in a hunting accident and later had a heart attack. Rather brutally, the Queen had him sacked and he and his wife ejected from their home, an action that quickly attracted public ire as “the saddest, nastiest, episode in racing history.” As the mood turned frosty, the Palace climbed down. Only the crisis over Princess Diana’s funeral would cause a similar threat to her popularity: more on that later.
Unlike Patrick White, many cultural figures were happy to meet the Queen. The Indigenous artist Clifford Possum, who knew little English but spoke six Aboriginal languages, went to Britain in 1990 for an exhibition arranged by art-dealer Rebecca Hossack, who later recalled that it was the “first ever major Aboriginal art exhibition in London.” At a garden party at Buckingham Palace, Possum and the Queen had “quite a long conversation.” “She had bush tobacco in her garden, which is called Pituri, and the Aboriginals chew it, and he noticed it and so she and he talked about it.” Hossack called it “an encounter between two impressive people from very different worlds, conversing across this great divide.”
“I have had the pleasure,” Paul McCartney recalls, “of meeting the Queen over the years.” Their first meeting was in 1965, when the four Beatles went to the Palace to receive their MBEs. Conversation with the Queen proved awkward — in John’s case, Brown suggests, this could have been because, as the Beatle later claimed, he had smoked marijuana in the Palace loo before the ceremony. “Have you been working hard recently,” the Queen asked John. His mind went blank, and he said no, we’ve been on holiday, though in fact they had been recording. The Queen turns to Paul, “Have you been together long?” With Ringo, McCartney begin singing an old music hall song, ‘My Old Dutch,’ with its line “we’ve been together now for forty years.” The Queen appeared nonplussed, not catching the allusion, and it wasn’t long before the quartet’s audience came to an end. We might suspect a tall story weighed down with buckets of salt.
Sitting next to the young Princess Elizabeth at a poetry recital shortly before her seventeenth birthday, T.S. Eliot chose to say nothing. “There was no conversation… I wanted to say that I was as bored as she was: but that might not have been quite the right thing.”
Poets, nonetheless, were important historically to British royalty, going back to John Dryden, who was appointed England’s first poet laureate in 1668. In more recent times, John Masefield was appointed by King George V in 1930 and remained in the job until his death in 1967. After the death of Cecil Day-Lewis in 1972, the names of various poets were bandied about, but W.H. Auden’s support unravelled when some conservative souls suggested that decent-minded citizens would be appalled to know that Auden was rumoured to be the anonymous author of a poem entitled “The Platonic Blow,” in an underground magazine called Suck. The poem included a description of the penis as “a royal column, ineffably solemn and wise.”
When the veteran poet John Betjeman was eventually chosen, he found it difficult to compose anything at all; over a period of three years he managed only to produce a celebration of Princess Anne’s wedding. When Prince Charles asked him to write something for the Queen’s Jubilee in 1976, Betjeman, already suffering from Parkinson’s disease, said no. But then he wrote some verses so banal they were mercilessly parodied in Private Eye. He remained poet laureate until his death in 1984.
Now Ted Hughes hove into view. Returning from a cruise on the Nile in November 1984, he found a letter from Margaret Thatcher asking whether he would object to his name being put forward to her majesty. He accepted. Alone among contemporary poets, he was a whole-hearted monarchist and took to his laureateship with zest and vigour.
It was in 1997 that the Queen experienced the crisis of public confidence that more than matched the reaction to her treatment of her injured horse trainer.
At around 1am on Sunday 31 August she was woken and told that Princess Diana had died in a car crash in Paris. By 4am prime minister Tony Blair and his press secretary Alastair Campbell had been informed. At 11.30am the royal family, all in black except for Prince Charles in his kilt, arrived at Crathie Kirk, just up the hill from Balmoral. At noon, Tony Blair spoke to the cameras: “We are today a nation, in Britain, in a state of shock, in mourning, in grief that is so deeply painful for us… She was the People’s Princess, and that’s how she’ll stay, how she will remain in our hearts and in our memories forever.”
Prince Charles flew to Paris, accompanied by Diana’s two sisters, to bring back Diana’s body. Members of the public queued along the Mall to sign a condolence book at St James’s Palace; before long, many more books were needed. The newspapers clamoured for the Queen to display grief: Where is our Queen? Show us you care. Your people are suffering, speak to us, Ma’am. Campbell thought the public mood against the royal family was becoming “dangerous and unpleasant.” Tony Blair, who regarded the mood as “menacing,” rang the Queen and told her a dangerous situation was developing for the monarchy: “Diana was a personality who made people feel they knew her when they didn’t, so there were many people out there feeling loss and wanting to blame.” There was a “popular clamour” for the royal family to “put their grief on display.”
Bowing to public opinion, the Queen permitted the union flag to fly over Buckingham Palace at half-mast. Thousands would spend the night in the Mall and in Kensington Gardens, where an estimated 10,000 candlelit shrines commemorated the late Princess.
After lunch the Queen left Balmoral, dressed in black, and arrived at Buckingham Palace. Out of nowhere, as she walked among the crowds in silence, a slip of a girl, eleven years old, handed her five red roses, saying, these are for you, your majesty. The crowd applauded.
At 6 pm the Queen appeared on television to address the nation. She paid tribute to Diana as an exceptional and gifted human being who had never lost her capacity to smile and laugh, nor to inspire others with her warmth and kindness. She professed admiration for Diana’s devotion to her two boys, her grandchildren. No one who knew Diana will ever forget her, she continued; millions of others who never met her, but felt they knew her, will remember. I for one, she added, believe there are lessons to be drawn from her life and from the extraordinary and moving reaction to her death. The public responded favourably to her speech.
More than a million people lined the funeral route, from Kensington Palace to Hyde Park Corner, down Constitution Hill to Buckingham Palace and on to Westminster Abbey. The Queen and other members of the family gathered by the gates of Buckingham Palace. As the funeral cortège passed, the Queen was seen giving a brief bow of the head (anticipating perhaps her bow to the monument to Anne Frank and Margot Frank in Bergen-Belsen). The hearse set off for Althorp, the seat of the Spencers for more than 500 years, with an estimated 300,000 people lining the last seven miles. The princess had a private burial on a little island in the lake in the grounds. As the coffin descended, Prince Harry was overcome: “I began to sob uncontrollably into my hands. I felt ashamed of violating the family ethos, but I couldn’t hold it in any longer.”
If we couple the Queen’s belief that “there are lessons to be drawn” from Diana’s life with the memory of Prince Harry sobbing at his mother’s burial then perhaps we can discern what those lessons might be. We might then understand why Harry eventually decided to break with the royal family’s ethos of silence and repression. And why Meghan chose to tell Oprah Winfrey that she had felt imprisoned and suicidal in the royal quarters, and yet never believed the Queen to be indifferent to her. •
A Voyage Around the Queen
By Craig Brown | HarperCollins | $37.99 | 662 pages
