VOYAGE
AROUND QUEEN HB: The new must-read biography of Queen Elizabeth II from the
winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize Hardcover – 29 Aug. 2024
by Craig
Brown (Author)
From one of
the funniest writers of our time, the award-winning and Sunday Times
bestselling author of One Two Three Four and Ma'am Darling turns his attention
to Queen Elizabeth II in an unforgettable and fascinating biography.
'Enthralling…
deliciously gossipy' MAIL ON SUNDAY
'Brilliant'
SARAH VINE
Virginia
Woolf compared her to a caterpillar; Anne Frank kept pictures of her on the
wall of her annex; Jimi Hendrix played her tune; Haile Selassie gave her a gold
tiara; Dirk Bogarde watched Death in Venice with her; Andy Warhol envied her
fame; Donald Trump offended her; E.M. Forster confessed he would have married
her, if only she had been a boy.
Queen
Elizabeth II was famous for longer than anyone who has ever lived. When people
spoke of her, they spoke of themselves; when they dreamed of her, they dreamed
of themselves. She mirrored their hopes and anxieties. To the optimist, she
seemed an optimist; to the pessimist, a pessimist; to the awestruck,
charismatic; and to the cynical, humdrum. Though by nature reserved and
unassuming, her presence could fill presidents and rock gods with terror. For
close to a century, she inhabited the psyche of a nation.
Combining
biography, essays, cultural history, dream diaries, travelogue and satire, the
bestselling and award-winning author of Ma'am Darling and One Two Three Four:
The Beatles in Time presents a kaleidoscopic portrait of this most public yet
private of sovereigns.
'An
enthralling reverie on memory, identity, coincidence and meaning – testing,
teasing, charming, moving and deceptively wise'RORY STEWART
'Completely
and utterly brilliant and exquisitely funny and fascinating. This book is, dare
I say, majestic. Craig Brown has no peers – I would curtsey to him if I met
him' MARINA HYDE
'You
wouldn’t think the world needed another book about Queen Elizabeth – but how
wrong you’d be. Craig Brown’s wholly original and enthralling biography is
absolute heaven from start to finish’ INDIA KNIGHT
'Craig Brown
continues to reinvent the art of biography… utterly fascinating' JASON COWLEY
Craig
Brown's book One Two Three Four won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction
in November 2020.
Books
Warhol
idolised her, Thatcher copied her and Kingsley Amis had a deep fear of farting
in her presence: but what was the Queen really like?
From
terrifying guests with invitations to ‘informal’ lunches to her relationship
with the first female prime minister - Craig Brown looks for the woman behind
the crown
Craig Brown
Sat 24 Aug
2024 10.00 CEST
When people
looked at the Queen, what did they see?
On one
level, the answer is obvious: they saw a living representation of the face they
had absorbed, often without noticing, almost every day of their lives: on
television, on coins and postcards, in newspapers and books and magazines,
online, on walls, in galleries and on stamps.
Those
presented to the Queen found the experience discombobulating. Though it may
have been the first time they had ever set eyes on her, they were often more
familiar with her face than with their own. Hers was the most photographed face
in human history.
So to meet
the Queen was apt to make you feel giddy or woozy, as though a well-loved
family portrait, familiar since childhood, handed down from generation to
generation, had suddenly sprung to life. For most, the experience was
unnerving, even terrifying.
She was what
we made of her. A friend of mine, a magazine editor, was asked to one of the
Queen’s regular “informal” lunches for distinguished people from different
walks of life. As he was ushered in, a senior courtier suggested that he might
care to spend a penny. When he said he didn’t think it necessary, the courtier
advised him it was best to be on the safe side: one or two previous guests had
“had an accident” upon being presented.
The comic
novelist Kingsley Amis was invited to one such lunch in 1975. “He had been
terrified for days about the unpremeditated fart or belch and was on a strict
non-bean-and-onion diet,” one of his oldest friends, Robert Conquest, gossiped
sneakily to another, Philip Larkin. His fear reignited itself 15 years later.
Before going to Buckingham Palace to receive a knighthood, Amis grew so
frightened of defecating in front of the Queen that, in the words of his son
Martin, he “had his doctor lay down a firewall of Imodium, and there was some
doubt, afterwards, whether he would ever again go to the toilet”.
Perhaps she
was less a painting, more a mirror. With her interior world screened from
public view, and her conversation restricted by protocol to questions not
answers, she became a human looking-glass: the light cast by fame bounced off
her, and back on to those she faced. To the optimist, she seemed an optimist;
to the pessimist, a pessimist. To the insider, she appeared intimate, to the
outsider, distant; to the cynic, prosaic, and to the awestruck, charismatic.
Having sat next to her at a banquet in Buckingham Palace in 1956, the Soviet
general secretary Nikita Khrushchev came away with the impression that she was
“the sort of young woman you’d be likely to meet walking along Gorky Street on
a balmy summer afternoon”.
When people
spoke of her, they spoke of themselves, and when they dreamed of her, they
dreamed of themselves. She reflected their hopes and anxieties. “Princess
Elizabeth and Philip are back in town, and across the street tonight,” wrote
the troubled young suspense writer Patricia Highsmith, staying in Rome on the
night of 19 April 1951. “Traffic bottlenecked & everyone angry &
bewildered.”
I met her
once, almost by chance. I was 20 years old, and a friend invited me to his
parents’ 25th wedding anniversary. His parents were titled and unusually
wealthy: their Kensington house came with a fake bookshelf in the sitting room,
which led into a ballroom.
This
ballroom was where the party was being held. I entered it early with my bunch
of friends. I imagine we made an effort to smarten up, but we were, for the
most part, a scruffy lot.
I must have
been aware that the Queen was there, but I had no thought of meeting her. I
felt she was for the real guests, the grownups. So it came as a surprise when,
crossing from one side of the crowded room to the other, I bumped into my
friend’s father, a very courteous man. “Ah, Craig,” he said. “Would you like to
be presented?”
So there I
was, a second later, shaking hands with the Queen. “Craig has been writing some
amusing articles for Punch magazine,” said my host.
“Really?
That must be fun,” she replied. I took this as a clear sign that she wanted to
know all about Punch and Private Eye and the difference between the two
magazines. I was unstoppable. Like most people she encountered, I found myself
talking gibberish. I told her all about English humour, and Wodehouse and Monty
Python and Just William and Marty Feldman, not forgetting Edward Lear and Lewis
Carroll. “How interesting,” she would chip in, every now and then, or
sometimes, “Most amusing”.
As I kept
talking, I noticed that, every now and then, she would take a step back. So I
would take a step forward, and she would take a step back, and so on. We might
have continued like this for ever – Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire – had my
friend’s father not intervened on her behalf, taking her off to speak to
someone else, and leaving me to make my way across the room, and back to
reality.
Andy Warhol
and the Queen were near contemporaries: the Queen was born in Mayfair, London,
on 21 April 1926 and Andy Warhol was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on 6
August 1928.
I spent a
few days shadowing Warhol on his visit to Britain in 1979, and noticed they had
other things in common, too. They had both met an inordinate number of people
(one out of choice, the other out of duty); both employed a similar stonewall
defence in interactions, somehow appearing to participate in conversation
without surrendering anything of themselves; both employed generalised
enthusiasm in a truncated form. For the Queen, “How interesting” or “Really?”
was usually sufficient to keep a conversation ticking along; Warhol was also
fond of “interesting”, but more often employed its transatlantic equivalent:
“Gee” or “Gee, that’s great”.
For meeting
strangers, these non-committal, reflex exclamations were usually more than
enough. The job of 20th-century celebrities was to mirror the expectations of
those they encountered.
Warhol and
the Queen both preferred to keep their feelings and opinions to themselves.
“She inclines to say less rather than more,” Prince Philip once observed of his
wife. Her critics would harp on about her blankness. Polly Toynbee once
described her as “the past mistress of nothingness”. Similar observations were
often levelled at Warhol, too, though in the bleak world of contemporary art
“nothingness” was often taken for praise.
The Queen
took her fame as a given. It was part of her, something she had to live with,
like a birthmark. But Warhol, unknown until his early 30s, never stopped
hankering for more. “I want to be as famous as the Queen of England,” he once
said.
On one visit
to England, Warhol visited Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s punk store
on the King’s Road, which had recently been renamed Seditionaries. In the
aftermath of punk, it had transformed from a revolutionary Situationist outpost
into a pricey tourist destination for punk memorabilia, though Warhol failed to
notice the difference. Among the retro souvenirs were T-shirts bearing the
Queen’s head, rendered punk by the addition of the cut-out newspaper headlines
“GOD Save THE QUEEN” and “SEX PISTOLS” over her eyes and mouth.
Three years
on, Warhol’s dealer wrote to the Queen asking for permission to use her
portrait in a series of screenprints. Ten days later, he received this letter
back:
Dear Mr
Mulder,
I am
commanded by The Queen to acknowledge your letter of 6th September about Mr.
Warhol’s plans to paint portraits of Their Majesties The Queens of Great
Britain, Denmark and The Netherlands. While The Queen would certainly not wish
to put
any obstacles in Mr. Warhol’s way, she would not dream of offering any comment
on this idea.
Yours
sincerely, W. Heseltine
By 1985,
Warhol’s screenprints – brightly coloured versions of Grugeon’s original 1975
portraits – were ready. Warhol rode in Prince Rupert Loewenstein’s Bentley to
the opening of his Reigning Queens exhibition on West Broadway and Green
Street. He left early, filled with self-loathing. “I’ve hit rock bottom,” he
confessed to his diary.
Nevertheless,
Warhol’s personal interest in royalty remained constant. Few, if any, British
artists shared his keen, almost feverish, fascination with even the most
humdrum Royal goings-on. On a trip to London on 9 July 1986, he noted, “This is
the week in between Wimbledon and Fergie’s marriage, so it was exciting.” And
two weeks later: “I’ve been watching this stuff on Fergie and I wonder why
doesn’t the Queen Mother get married again.”
He had once
taken a fancy to the Queen’s second son, but with time his interest faded.
“Prince Andrew has gotten so ugly, he’s looking like his mother,” he noted in
his diary on 11 February 1987. This was to be one of his last entries: 11 days
later, he underwent a routine operation on his gallbladder, and died.
But a
quarter of a century after his death, Andy Warhol secured himself a permanent
home in Buckingham Palace. For an undisclosed sum, the Royal Collection
purchased the portrait of the Queen from the Reigning Queens portfolio in its
expensive “Royal” edition, sprinkled with diamond dust, lending it a sparkly
effect.
“Warhol has
simplified Grugeon’s portrait so that all that remains is a mask-like face,”
runs the official Royal Collection catalogue entry. “All character has been
removed and we are confronted by a symbol of royal power.”
Another
contemporary of the Queen, just six months her senior, was Margaret Thatcher.
The 23-year-old Margaret Roberts first set eyes on her future monarch at
Newmarket races in 1949. She immediately succumbed to a common delusion. “SAW
PRINCESS ELIZABETH, AND SHE SAW ME!” she wrote in excited capitals in a
boyfriend’s diary.
Thirteen
years later, by now a married woman and the Conservative MP for Finchley,
Margaret Thatcher was pleased to be invited to a reception at Buckingham
Palace. “The Queen has a much stronger personality than most people realise and
she is certainly not overshadowed by the Duke of Edinburgh,” she told her
father in a letter home. As she gazed at the Queen that day, was she, like so
many others, unconsciously thinking of herself?
Once she
became prime minister, Mrs Thatcher would visit the Queen every Tuesday for her
weekly audience in Buckingham Palace. These audiences were, says Mrs Thatcher’s
authorised biographer Charles Moore, “rarely productive, because Mrs Thatcher
was nervous. The Queen noted the way in which her prime minister could never
relax in her presence. ‘Why does she always sit on the edge of her seat?’ she
asked.”
The
relationship between the two most famous and powerful women in the country was,
in the words of the Queen’s private secretary, William Heseltine, “absolutely
correct and perhaps not very cosy”. Heseltine felt this might have been at
least partly the fault of the Queen, “for not coming in when Mrs Thatcher drew
breath and turning the talk into more of a discussion”. For her part, the Queen
seems to have been intrigued by what went on in her prime minister’s head.
“Do you
think Mrs Thatcher will ever change?” she once asked Lord Carrington,
Thatcher’s first foreign secretary.
“Oh no,
Ma’am,” replied Carrington. “She would not be Mrs Thatcher if she did.”
How the two
women interacted became a topic of speculation.
Susannah
Constantine, who had for some time been the girlfriend of Princess Margaret’s
son, Viscount Linley, once witnessed a tussle over a teapot between the Queen
and Mrs Thatcher.
In 1984, at
the age of 22, she went to stay at Balmoral. The Thatchers were fellow guests.
“While Denis was actually very relaxed, Thatcher was awkward,” she recalled. In
the afternoon, six or seven gathered by the side of the river for tea and
sandwiches in a hut “the size of a suburban front room … one of them was the
prime minister and another the Queen”.
A large
teapot, known as Brown Betty, was ready on the table, “like the Queen herself,
unfrivolous, sturdy and practical. Fit for purpose.”
As was her
usual practice, the Queen lifted the teapot as Susannah Constantine held out
her china cup. “As if by magic, a redundant Thatcher appeared at her side like
a spectre. ‘Let me do that, Your Majesty.’”
Without
further ado, Mrs Thatcher put her hand beneath the teapot to take its weight,
but “her offer was met with unexpected resistance from the Queen”. Not knowing
what to do, Constantine lowered her cup a little, whereupon Mrs Thatcher
“tightened her fingertips around the base and tried once again to take the pot
from its owner, but no … Evidently the Queen had no intention of relinquishing
the fat, brown pot. A further, more determined pull from Thatcher was met with
an equally resolute hold from Her Majesty.”
Constantine
put her cup and saucer back down on the table. “I didn’t imagine the Queen was
actually going to kill Thatcher … but it was quite tense. Then all of a sudden,
without warning, the pot was free: released back to its rightful owner.
Thatcher had thrown in the towel.”
Few who
witnessed them together could resist gossiping about their peculiar dynamic;
any signs of friction were beadily chronicled. For instance, on 10 September
1985, Kenneth Rose wrote in his diary that the Queen had complained to Lady
Trumpington, “She stays too long and talks too much. She has lived too long
among men.”
Gossip like
this continued for many years after Mrs Thatcher’s fall from power. On 1 June
1997, Rose was Isaiah Berlin’s guest at “a sumptuous tea”. Afterwards, Rose
wrote in his diary that Berlin had told him that Mrs Thatcher and the Queen had
been at daggers drawn over the Commonwealth:
“Both the
Queen and Thatcher came to a gala at Covent Garden, but sat in different parts
of the house. In the interval the Queen let it be known that she did not want
to meet Mrs Thatcher – who was sent to an upper room for drinks, as was Isaiah.
Thatcher then said she would like to say goodbye to the Queen, a request that
was ignored.”
But even
after a decade or more as prime minister, Margaret Thatcher’s sense of
old-fashioned awe in the presence of her monarch never left her. On Christmas
Day, she would still make sure that lunch was finished in time to watch the
Queen’s speech on television. “She revered both the constitution and the
monarch,” recalled her devoted bushy-browed press secretary Sir Bernard Ingham.
“That was manifested in the way she curtsied. I’ve never seen anyone go so low
and I wondered if she’d ever get up. It used to be a bit of a joke – how low
will she go this time?”
As her years
in Downing Street rolled on, some observers began to notice that Mrs Thatcher
was beginning, in a strange, shape-shifting way, to morph into the monarch.
Little by little, she took on many of the Queen’s most familiar props: her
thick-heeled patent-leather shoes, her handbag and, on formal occasions, her
regal cloaks and gowns. She even started adopting the royal “we”, employing it
in increasingly bizarre ways. “We are a grandmother,” she told reporters after
the birth of her son Mark’s baby boy.
For her
part, the Queen was known to find the Thatchers a little comical in their
efforts to please. The Duke of Devonshire told James Lees-Milne that the Queen
was “quite indiscreet” about the Thatchers. “She said to one of the equerries
at the Palace while awaiting them, ‘Don’t make me laugh when Denis bows from
the waist.’”
After the
1982 Falklands conflict, some felt Mrs Thatcher had usurped the role of the
Queen by taking the salute at the victory parade; her visit to the Falklands
the following January resembled a royal progress. “The constant references to
‘her’ troops proclaim that this is a royal visit,” wrote a commentator in the
Times. After national disasters, she would lose no time in visiting the
victims. “In the event of death or serious injury” read a joke badge, popular
among her opponents, “I do not wish to be visited by Margaret Thatcher”.
In 1985, two
psychiatrists, Dr Ian Deary and Dr Simon Wessely, reported on a new phenomenon
in the British Medical Journal. Four of their patients suffering from advanced
dementia – unable to remember their own names, or what year it was – were
nevertheless able to name Mrs Thatcher as the prime minister. A study of files
from 1963 and 1968 revealed one further oddity. In those years, Queen Elizabeth
II had been identified with much greater frequency than either of the two prime
ministers. But by 1983 “Mrs Thatcher … was clearly more prominent in our
patients’ minds than the monarch.”
“We have
become a nation with two monarchs,” observed the political commentator (and
later novelist) Robert Harris in 1988. “ … On her housewife/superstar progress
around the world, Margaret Thatcher has steadily become more like the Queen of
England than the real thing.”
Some sensed
a competitive edge in relations between the two women. During one of her annual
diplomatic receptions at the Palace, the Queen noticed that her prime minister,
feeling a little faint, had decided to take a seat. “Oh, look, she’s keeled
over again,” she observed, coolly.
But if there
was friction between them, it vanished with Mrs Thatcher’s departure from
office. After giving the Queen notice of her resignation, “She was deeply
upset,” recalled Lord Fellowes; “ … when she emerged, she was in a very
distressed state and unable to speak.” Back in Downing Street, “she went
straight upstairs to the flat and ran to the bathroom and she absolutely wept,”
recalled her personal assistant. “She said: ‘It’s when people are kind to you
that you feel it most. The Queen has been so kind to me.’”
In 2005, an
80th birthday party was thrown for Margaret Thatcher at the Mandarin Oriental
Hotel in Knightsbridge. By now, a series of strokes had rendered her mind hazy.
As she saw the Queen approaching, she asked, “Is it all right if I touch her?”
She held out her hand as she curtsied, and the Queen took it and steadied her.
“That was
unusual for the British, who know you are not supposed to touch the Queen,”
observed her former private secretary for foreign affairs, Charles Powell. “But
they were hand in hand, and the Queen led her around the room.”
.jpeg)
No comments:
Post a Comment