For the Queen Mother, the social life she established in the 1960s continued into the 1970s, as did her public engagements and tours. She particularly enjoyed the social aspect of horse racing, and her friends in the racing world included the retired athlete Colonel William Whitbread, who had a very busy romantic life. He often turned up to races with whomsoever he was dating at the time, introducing the woman in question as his niece to avoid awkward questions.
Spotting Whitbread at the racecourse one afternoon with a new plus one, the Queen Mother asked knowingly, “Billy! Another niece?”1
The Queen Mother’s interest in racing began in earnest in 1949 after she was seated next to a jockey at dinner. Her initial investment was to go halfers with her eldest daughter on a horse called Monaveen; from there, her commitments grew until she had a stable of horses, riding in the Strathmore colours and scoring over four hundred combined victories over the decades. She insisted on being kept appraised of the horses’ well-being and admitted, “I’ve loved horses ever since I was a little girl. Probably one gets too fond of them.” She wept as she watched an American horse-whisperer named Monty Roberts treat one of her nervous fillies, calling his gift “one of the most wonderful things I’ve ever seen in my life.” Even from her hospital bed, when she was being treated for cancer, Queen Elizabeth regularly called the stables to check that “my darlings” were being properly looked after. At one Grand National, her horse, Devon Loch, collapsed near the winning post. According to Michael Adeane and the Duke of Devonshire, both of whom were with the Queen Mother when they heard the groan go up from the crowd, she stood and left, saying, “I must go down and comfort those poor people.” She then dried the jockey’s tears, checked on the horse and went to visit the stable lads, “who were also in tears.”
“That’s racing,” she said. “There will be another time.”
The Queen, who shared her mother’s love of the pastime, once spotted her on television at the Cheltenham races and phoned later that day to urge her to wrap up more sensibly during bad weather. It had been miserably cold, yet the Queen Mother had dressed for the beautiful summer’s afternoon she wanted, rather than the gloomy one forecast.
“Don’t worry, darling,” she replied. “I’ve got my pearls to keep me warm.”
In her private life, by the 1970s Elizabeth was grandmother to six—the princes Charles, Andrew and Edward; Princess Anne; and Princess Margaret’s two children David, Viscount Linley, and Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones. Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee in 1977 was marked with many celebrations across Britain, organised both by the government and local communities. It was, sadly, the first decade Elizabeth experienced without any of her siblings. Her eldest sister Mary, Lady Elphinstone, had died in 1961; Rose, by then Dowager Countess Granville, passed away in the first half of 1967, and their youngest sibling, David, in the second half.
Cecil Beaton described the Queen Mother as a marshmallow forged on a welding machine. That toughness was passed on to some of her grandchildren, particularly her eldest granddaughter. In 1974, shortly after Princess Anne’s marriage to Captain Mark Phillips, their car was stopped by a man with a gun and suffering from severe mental ill health. He shot—though not fatally—her protection officer, her driver and a journalist, then pointed the gun at 23-year-old Anne, ordering her to come with him. “Not bloody likely,” she answered. The man tried to drag her out of the vehicle, while her husband successfully fought to keep her in the car until a passer-by, boxer Ronnie Russell, rushed over and punched the assailant twice in the head. Enough unwounded policemen quickly arrived to get the patient safely away.
Politically, the issue of Northern Ireland’s continued membership of the United Kingdom came to a boil in the most hideous way possible, as the country slid into a generation of political and sectarian violence—referred to simply as “The Troubles”—in which many atrocities were committed from 1969 to 1998. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) were forthright about their determination to target members of the Royal Family, which led, belatedly, to a steep increase in their security.
Throughout the 1970s, the Castle of Mey remained Elizabeth’s favourite home.2 Guests invited for the first time might be treated by her to two traditions. The first was a stroll across the lawns, all of which were free from chemical fertilisers as per the Queen Mother’s explicit instructions. “Nobody likes them!” she informed her guests. (She was wrong, if ahead of the curve, as they were very popular in British agriculture in the 1970s.) Past the lawns, she took her debuting guests to see two enormous cannons, pointing out to sea—“in case Napoleon ever came,” Queen Elizabeth explained.
Next on the tour she showed her guests round the castle with its tartan wallpaper which, when it appeared in an American magazine, inspired the designer Ralph Lauren to create tartan and plaid wallpapers for his collections. The Queen Mother liked to inform the guests that her castle was “either a small big house or a big small house,” and to take them up to the turrets from where, in 1621, Lady Elizabeth Sinclair had thrown herself in despair after her father, the Earl of Caithness, locked her in the tower to punish her for falling in love with a local farmhand. Sinclair, known as “the Green Lady,” was said to haunt the uppermost floors of the tower from which she had jumped to her death.
Those who had already stayed at Mey on previous occasions were excused the tour. This was welcome news for one Sir Frederick, who had taken the sleeper train up from London, then grabbed a bite of something questionable for breakfast in a railway café before motoring to Mey, where he arrived while the Queen Mother was showing off to the newcomers the anti-Bonaparte ballistics. One of the servants conducted Sir Frederick to his room, where he bolted to the bathroom—but did not bolt the door—as he fell victim to “rather a dicky tum-tum” in consequence of his dubious breakfast. Unfortunately, Sir Frederick had been allocated a bedroom in the turret haunted by the Green Lady and his lavatory window was the one from which, according to legend, she had leapt in 1621. Toilet-trapped by his digestive tribulations, Sir Frederick heard his hostess ascending the stairs while regaling her guests with the tragic tale of Lady Elizabeth Sinclair and her plough-toting lover. Frederick froze—not that he had much choice by way of room for manoeuvre—banking that silence too would spare him any embarrassment. Surely, the Queen Mother wouldn’t bring guests in here?
Alas. A Green Lady did appear in Sir Frederick’s turret, in the form of a tartan-, wool- and pearl-wearing Queen Mother who cheerfully flung open the door to the lavatory, flanked by four guests. Sir Frederick, sans culottes, decided that under the circumstances, bowing to the dowager queen seemed ill-advised. There was a silent beat before the Queen Mother smiled politely and turned to her guests with a regal gesture to announce, “And this is Sir Frederick’s bathroom!” Nodding at Sir Frederick, who remarked later that he wished he were dead, Queen Elizabeth sailed off down the corridor with her tour party, all of whom forgot to close the door.
In 1971, Japan’s Emperor Hirohito arrived in the United Kingdom for the first time in fifty years. Between the visits lay the Second World War, in which the two countries had been on opposing sides. The arrival of the Emperor and Empress was intended to mark a rapprochement, a quarter of a century after the war’s end. This was easier for diplomats to promote than it was for veterans to support. Many survivors of the Japanese prisoner-of-war camps, some of them victims of torture, protested against the imperial visit, and as the New York Times correspondent noted, the London crowds were eerily quiet as the Emperor and the Queen rode in a horse-drawn carriage towards Buckingham Palace. At a pre-arranged symbol, dozens of former POWs turned their backs as the Emperor passed.
Where the Queen encouraged reconciliation, the Queen Mother marched hand in glove with her own generation. During one of the imperial trips, she was quite prepared to risk a diplomatic incident—and the deliberate humiliation of their guests—by ordering that the Japanese Sword of Surrender from 1945 be included in the objects of interest traditionally laid out for visiting heads of state. The Queen, fortunately for all concerned, swiftly vetoed the idea.
The Queen Mother was a moderately good shot in everything except conversation, where her skill level rose to expert. She certainly did not miss and hit the wall when Prince Charles suggested inviting the Duke and Duchess of Windsor to stay. Prince Charles explained, “I, personally, feel it would be wonderful if Uncle David and his wife could come over and spend a weekend. Now that he is getting old, he must long to come back and it would seem pointless to continue the feud.” He hoped that it would give him a chance to talk properly with his great-aunt Wallis, since “it is worthwhile getting to know the better side of her.”
The Queen Mother did not think there was a better side, either to her sister-in-law or to the proposed invitation. Her relationship with her eldest grandson was a close and loving one—Princess Margaret told her mother she had never seen a grandchild as devoted to a grandparent as Charles was to her—but no amount of affection could induce the Queen Mother to soften on Wallis and David. Instead, Charles had to visit the Duke and Duchess at their beautiful home on the outskirts of Paris. He left more in sympathy with his grandmother’s views, concluding that the Duchess of Windsor was “totally unsympathetic and somewhat superficial. Very little warmth of the true kind; only that brilliant hostess type of charm but without feeling. All that she talked about was whether she would wear a hat at the Arc de Triomphe the next day. Uncle David then talked about how difficult my family had made it for him for the past 33 years.”
Studying the daily lives of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor after 1945, their existence reads like Sartre’s Huis Clos with product placement by Cartier. It is hard to tell if they were bored by an unending life of privilege with nothing to do in recompense, although Wallis’s letters prove that she certainly struggled—often profoundly—with the emotional burdens and intellectual anaesthesia imposed on her by her dim-witted, permanently offended husband. The crown he had given up “for her” became a punishing weight in Wallis’s life. She was painfully aware of pressure to live up to a sacrifice that she had begged him not to make in 1936 but which she spent the rest of his life trying to compensate for. Four decades passed for Wallis of catering to David’s every whim, trying to create a life in which sybaritic luxury distracted from the rolling of one pointless year into the next. If Wallis felt any embarrassment at her husband’s constant—and absurd—fear of poverty, she hid it masterfully, even during incidents like their being photographed on the decks of the American luxury liner United States in return for a free suite across the Atlantic. Blaming himself for anything was as much of an anathema to Edward VIII as a budget. Everything had to be somebody else’s fault—usually his family’s, and specifically the Queen Mother’s. Neither the Duke nor Wallis had thawed with regard to Elizabeth any more than she had with respect to them by 1971, when they were visited by the writer Michael Thornton.
“So,” the Duke began, “you’re planning to write a book about the Queen Mother.” He turned to Wallis. “Well, we shall have to be extremely careful what we say on that subject, won’t we darling?”
Thornton sensibly asked him why, although he presumably already knew the answer.
“I hope your book will tell the truth,” the Duke urged, “instead of all that guff they dish out about her. Behind that great abundance of charm is a shrewd, scheming and extremely ruthless woman. But, of course, you can’t quote that.”
Wallis correctly identified the Queen Mother as the main reason why they had never been welcomed to return to live in Britain, and wondered out loud if “When we are dead, perhaps she may at last forgive us.” She confided in Thornton that Elizabeth was “jealous of me” for marrying David, which was less credible; by then, Wallis wasn’t jealous of herself for marrying darling David.
After pushing the theory that Elizabeth must have been secretly in love with him for the thirteen years between her wedding and his abdication, the Duke said, “My sister-in-law is an arch-intriguer, and she has dedicated herself to making life hell for both of us.”
“I heard even Hitler was afraid of her,” added Wallis, without realising that most people would see that as a compliment. Perhaps one too many evenings of playing Bridge with the Mosleys had dulled Wallis to what the name “Hitler” meant to the rest of the world.
The Queen called on the Duke and Duchess during a state visit to Paris, but they had not reconciled with the Queen Mother when the Duke died in France from cancer on May 28, 1972. His body was brought home to England for burial, and at the funeral, as protocol demanded for widows, the Queen Mother yielded precedence to the Duchess and walked behind her. Wallis had been extremely nervous about seeing Elizabeth, although she allegedly drew some comfort from Lord Mountbatten, who greeted her at the airport with the reassurance that the Queen Mother “is deeply sorry for you in your present grief and remembers what it was like when her own husband died.”
While both the Queen Mother and the Duchess of Windsor behaved with great dignity at their first meeting in thirty-six years, there was no warmth. For the funeral, Wallis wore a black gown, coat, hat and veil made personally for the occasion by Hubert Givenchy. The Duchess told friends that the Queen Mother looked ridiculous in a hideous hat and frumpy dress, but that everything had been done properly during her three-day stay in London. There is no record of the Queen Mother bidding her sister-in-law farewell before she returned to Paris.
The Queen Mother’s public engagements continued at a high volume into her seventies. She had three questions that she could fall back on if conversation dried up—“And what do you do?” “Have you come far?” and “Aren’t we lucky with the weather?” Meaning that the nightmare engagement was a rural retirement community on a rainy day.
One of Elizabeth’s favourite stories to tell at her own expense came from an engagement she undertook at a retirement home in Norwich, when she walked over to greet an elderly resident.
The Queen Mother smiled, “Hello.”
“Hello.”
Still smiling, “Do you know who I am?”
The resident nodded sympathetically and said, “If you don’t know who you are, dear, there’s some nice nurses at a table at the end of this corridor who can help you out.”
Granny duties became a part even of the Queen Mother’s routine.3 While the Queen and Prince Philip were on a tour of the Commonwealth, the Queen Mother took over the care of her younger grandsons, the princes Andrew and Edward. Andrew, the future Duke of York, was notoriously disliked by the royals’ servants, as would become very clear between 2020 and 2022, when the litany of scandals in which he had involved himself absolved many of them of the loyalty, or timidity, that had hitherto secured their silence. One individual memorably went on record for the Sunday Times to say, “He’s a total dickhead, an arrogant shit.”4 Even long before, one of the Queen Mother’s equerries had described Prince Andrew as “a rude, ignorant sod, and [I] felt like decking him” after witnessing how he spoke to his family’s employees. During his stay with his grandmother, Andrew irritated a member of the Queen Mother’s stable staff until the young man, close to the Prince’s age, lost his temper and hit the Prince, thereby knocking him into a pile of manure. Andrew shouted that he would tell his grandmother about this, and the next day, seeing the Queen Mother walking with her corgis, the lad went over to confess to her and offer his resignation. After hearing him out, the Queen Mother waved her hand dismissively. “You mustn’t worry about it. I’m quite certain Prince Andrew deserved it.”
Aged about eight, Andrew would run outside to a guard at Buckingham Palace who had to salute him. Andrew used this as an opportunity to blow raspberries, until the guard snapped and said, “Look! Get lost.” Andrew did, briefly, then returned with his father Prince Philip in tow.
“I understand you told my son to get lost?”
“I did, Your Royal Highness.”
“Well, why did you tell him to get lost? Come on, tell me.”
“Well, sir, he kept blowing raspberries at me and every time he comes out, I have to salute him and he’s come out about twenty times now in the space of a couple of minutes.”
Prince Philip turned to Prince Andrew and shouted, “Well, you’ve heard the man: go on, get lost!”5
When the family were in Scotland, the Queen Mother sometimes stayed at a comparatively small dower house called Birkhall in the grounds of Balmoral. She stuck to the Edwardian tradition whereby men and women separated after dinner, before reuniting for a nightcap if anybody should still be up. She adored practical jokes; after one supper, a gentleman led the other men back into the Drawing Room to see if any of the ladies were still awake. Seeing the room was empty, he turned to his companions and said, “Thank goodness, they’ve all fucked off to bed!”
“I’m rather afraid we haven’t,” came the Queen Mother’s voice from their hiding spot behind a curtain.
Elizabeth quietly exhaled the French word “Devoir” (“Duty”) to her daughters in public if she felt they needed reminding of the guiding principle. The Queen Mother, Elizabeth II and Princess Margaret regularly lunched together, during which occasions they often conversed in French. At one such lunch, the Queen decided she might, on this occasion, have another glass of wine.
“Are you sure that’s wise, darling?” the Queen Mother asked. “You know you have to reign all afternoon.”
“Oh, Mummy!”
When, one day in the late 1940s, Queen Elizabeth walked into a corridor at Windsor Castle, she saw Anthony Blunt, Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, lying on the ground as he prepared to move an enormous painting by the seventeenth-century artist Anthony van Dyck.
“Oh Anthony, I hope that hasn’t got to go. That’s one of my favourite pictures,” she said.
Blunt explained that it was off for cleaning by experts. He was being helped in the task of moving it by his boyfriend, Alan Baker, who “scrambled to my feet and was about to leave” when Queen Elizabeth said, “Oh no, no, no,” and invited the couple to tea in her apartments. “She was very friendly,” Baker remembered. “They were obviously very friendly. He liked her a lot.”
Anthony Blunt—one of the great art historians of the twentieth century—was distantly related to Queen Elizabeth. His mother Hilda was a second cousin of the Queen Mother’s late father.6 Alan Baker was correct that Blunt, who was knighted in 1956 for his services to the Royal Family, liked the Queen Mother, in sharp contrast to his low opinion of her husband, whose intellectual capabilities and social awkwardness were both mocked by Blunt in his private conversations. He had liked, too, her mother-in-law Queen Mary, who attended many of his lectures and shared his love of history. He was trusted enough by the royals that, in 1945, they sent him on a secret mission to Germany to arrange for the repatriation of thousands of letters written by Queen Victoria to her eldest daughter, wife of the German Kaiser Friedrich III and mother of Wilhelm II. By 1945, the documents were held by a German princess who, having lost sons in both world wars, had become fanatically anti-British; it says a lot for Blunt’s diplomacy that he persuaded her to part with the late Empress’s letters.
The extent of the British royals’ trust in Blunt, and his friendship with the Queen Mother, are particularly remarkable in light of the fact that Sir Anthony was a KGB agent. Having been recruited by the Soviets during his student days at Cambridge in the 1930s, he persuaded people in Britain that he had renounced his youthful support for Communism, while remaining active as a Communist spy until the early 1960s. The Queen Mother attended a lunch on the day the scandal of Blunt’s espionage broke to the public, thanks to the publication in 1979 of the book Climate of Treason by investigative journalist Andrew Boyle. When a fellow guest at the lunch, unable to contain his curiosity, asked her what she thought of Blunt, she coldly shut the question down with, “Lovely day, isn’t it?”
The Queen Mother was strongly anti-Communist in her views. In a conversation with President Eisenhower years earlier, she fully supported the British and American positions during the Cold War, telling the President, “We must be firm” against the Soviet Union. She was horrified by the enforced spread of Communism into eastern Europe in the years after 1945 and, in a remark that many interpreted as something she hoped would make its way back to Blunt, “The one person I cannot stand is a traitor.”
Yet, years later, when she was prepared to talk about Blunt, she was surprisingly forgiving, reflecting in a conversation with the prominent anti-Communist philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin that “A lot of people made terrible mistakes—one shouldn’t really go on persecuting them.”
Deborah Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, went to the opera one painfully cold January evening in 1980, the kind of night in London in which we imagine we will see the city looking like an ice-speckled suburb of Narnia when in truth one is hit by a miserable freezing fog that makes you look over your shoulder for Jack the Ripper. The Duchess was nervous about attendance numbers, as the evening had been organised by her husband to raise money for a local hospital. Luckily, the Queen Mother RSVP’d with a yes.
“Good old Cake came & turned it into a gala,” the Duchess wrote to one of her absent friends. “One forgets between seeing her what a star she is & what incredible & wicked charm she has got.”
Star timing was not, however, the Queen Mother’s forte that night. She lost track of it while chatting with the Duchess during the interval. Then, she heard the opening strains of the National Anthem from the orchestra pit.
“Oh God!” the Queen Mother cried and returned to the royal box, trying, aged seventy-nine, to clear the stairs like an Olympic long jumper with something to prove.
“She flew up the stairs,” the Duchess observed, “dropping her old white fox cape & didn’t look round to see what would happen to it.”
She just about made it back in time to be seen standing, singing, and smiling as the anthem asking God to save her daughter came to an end.