Lady Diana Spencer moved into the Queen Mother’s home at Clarence House in February 1981, following her engagement to the Prince of Wales. Both women had a great ability to see the fun in a situation and to put people at their ease. They were from almost identical backgrounds, as earls’ daughters from old aristocratic families, although in Diana’s case one with long-standing ties to the court. Another key difference was that whereas Elizabeth’s upbringing had been so happy that it made her reluctant to marry into the Royal Family, Diana’s had much instability, and she was so keen on the idea of marrying a Windsor that, driving past Buckingham Palace in the 1970s, she told a friend how wonderful it would be to marry the future king, “like Anne Boleyn or Guinevere.” All things considered, those two probably were not the most inspiring examples.
The Queen Mother had known members of Diana’s family since she befriended her great-aunt Lavinia as a teenager during the First World War, and it was assumed, then and later, that the Queen Mother had masterminded the marriage between her grandson and Lavinia’s great-niece. This was the version of events immortalised—if that’s the right word—in 1982’s The Royal Romance of Charles and Diana, one of the cheerful pieces of televisual fluff that the British royals now receive as an off-registry wedding gift. While the script of The Royal Romance of Charles and Diana was not exactly Shakespeare, it could not be faulted on its casting, with its peppering of screen royalty and the real thing. The Queen Mother was played by Olivia de Havilland, Prince Philip by Stewart Granger, Diana’s mother by Holland Taylor, and Diana by Catherine Oxenburg, daughter of a Yugoslavian princess. In the obligatory “learning to be a royal” montage, de Havilland’s Queen Mother gives Oxenburg’s Diana a crash course in etiquette and media management.
There were some early real-life tensions. Diana was upset that, at family dinners, Charles would ask the Queen and the Queen Mother what they wanted to drink before he asked her: “Fine, no problem,” she remembered later, “but I had to be told that was normal because I always thought it was the wife first. Stupid thought!” At the end of the decade, although her marriage to Charles had deteriorated, Princess Diana spoke warmly of her husband’s grandmother, and she wore the Queen Mother’s engagement gift during a visit to the White House when she famously danced with movie star John Travolta. Originally, it was an enormous sapphire brooch, until Diana had the sapphire reset into seven ropes of pearls, kept labelled in her handwriting as “Engagement present given to me by Queen Elizabeth, February 24 1981.”
The 1980s also brought four more great-grandchildren for Elizabeth. Her first, Peter Phillips, had been born in 1977—Elizabeth called it “one of the happiest days of my life”—and Princess Anne gave birth to her second child, Zara, in 1981. Prince Charles and Princess Diana welcomed baby William in 1982 and his brother Henry, universally known as Harry, two years later. Prince Andrew’s eldest daughter, Princess Beatrice, whom the Queen Mother adored, was born in London in 1988.
Socially, the 1980s proved a time of rapidly changing, and competing, moods. For the entirety of the decade, Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister, her right-wing policies attracting applause and rage in almost equal measure. It was also the era of the AIDS crisis, in which two of the Queen Mother’s relatives, the princesses Margaret and Diana, faced severe criticism for their involvement. After publicly hugging an AIDS patient, Diana was sneeringly dubbed “the patron saint of sodomy” by hostile journalists. Princess Margaret helped found, opened and visited London Lighthouse in 1988 as a hospice for those in the final stage of the disease, and she became patron of the Terrence Higgins Trust, a charity that promotes awareness and healthcare surrounding AIDS and all sexually transmitted conditions. Margaret’s friend, Lady Glenconner, lost her son Henry to AIDS, eighteen months after diagnosis, and she wrote later that Margaret was one of the very few people who continued to visit their home and the only friend who put her arms around Henry in a hug.
Apart from her refusal to cancel her visits to a volatile Northern Ireland, the Queen Mother was far less involved in the struggles and tribulations of the Eighties. Various polls confirmed her position as a popular member of the Royal Family, often pipping the Queen and Princess Diana to top position, and she continued to make hundreds of public appearances every year.
The Queen Mother’s drinky-poo was late.1 Realising that her footman Billy Tallon had become distracted in a quarrel with his on-again-off-again boyfriend and colleague, Reg Wilcox, the Queen Mother wafted towards the staircase to ask, “Would one of you old queens mind getting this old queen a drink?”
One of the most notorious incidents surrounding the Queen Mother was the fate of two of her nieces, Nerissa and Katherine Bowes-Lyon. They were two of the five daughters of her late brother Jock, who had died in 1930. Half a century later, the newspapers discovered that Jock’s daughters had been institutionalised and that their famous aunt never visited. From that revelation, Nerissa and Katherine’s story transmogrified into a latter-day take on the Monster of Glamis, with the subsequent elaboration that the order to lock them away had in fact come from the Queen Mother herself, who was embarrassed by her nieces’ condition and, once her husband became king in 1936, had the girls sent away to spare her, or the monarchy, any embarrassment.2
Nerissa and Katherine had severe developmental issues at a time when institutionalisation was not limited to the elite. It was, then, standard medical practice across the social spectrum.3 There is no evidence whatsoever that Elizabeth had any role in, or knowledge of, the decision to institutionalise her nieces. Nor did it take place in 1936. In 1941, five years after Elizabeth became queen, Nerissa and Katherine’s mother, Fenella, accepted her doctor’s advice that her third and fifth daughters should be permanently hospitalised. After Jock’s death, and particularly after Cecilia’s, his children had been raised predominantly by their mother’s family. Tragically, neither sister recognised their mother, although they knew one another, and so the decision was taken that they must be kept together. They had hitherto been cared for in a country house paid for by Fenella’s father, Lord Clinton, and there was a history of serious mental health problems in Fenella’s family, the Hepburn-Stuart-Forbes-Trefusises. Fenella’s only sister Harriet was also institutionalised by the family, and the same decision was taken subsequently for three of Harriet’s daughters, Idomea, Rosemary and Ethelreda, all three of whom had spent their childhoods cared for in the same cottage as Nerissa and Katherine.4
As their late father’s youngest sister, the Queen Mother was not high in the pecking order with respect to decisions regarding medical care. She was not even the sisters’ closest royal relative. They had an elder sister, Anne Bowes-Lyon, who in 1950 married Prince Georg-Valdemar of Denmark. After Fenella’s death in 1966, it was Princess Anne of Denmark who was Nerissa’s senior relative, socially and legally. Along with their sister Diana Somervell, it was she who made decisions regarding Nerissa and Katherine’s care—which, by the standards of the time, was considered excellent.
There are nonetheless inconsistencies in accounts of how much the Queen Mother allegedly knew about her nieces in care: specifically, the claim that she lost touch completely with Fenella’s side of the family and believed the sisters had passed away. The Queen Mother attended their sister Anne’s wedding reception in 1950, and their niece Katherine Somervell is Elizabeth II’s goddaughter, at whose wedding Fenella had been a guest. It seems highly unlikely, almost to the point of impossible, that Elizabeth did not know that Nerissa and Katherine had gone into care. However, once it was brought to her attention precisely where the sisters were living, the Queen Mother sent birthday gifts as well as cheques to the institution to provide Christmas gifts and parties for the residents.5 She was neither author of the decision, nor an objector to it.
The tragedy of Nerissa and Katherine Bowes-Lyon is less a Machiavellian tale of a scheming wicked queen than a glimpse into the fate of thousands, be it their aunt Harriet, their three cousins or people from every possible background in the United Kingdom who lived through a time—now mercifully passed—when such attitudes towards mental health were prevalent.
In the early 1980s, Elizabeth was overruled by her eldest daughter on a question concerning King George V. Kenneth Rose, a writer whom the Queen Mother liked very much, had been interviewing her in preparation for his forthcoming biography of her father-in-law, when the Queen Mother and various courtiers realised that Rose was planning to drop a bombshell that implicated George V in an act of cowardice that had helped cause a relative’s death.
In early 1917, George V’s cousin, Tsar Nicholas II, had lost power thanks to the Russian Revolution, which brought down over three centuries of rule by his family, the House of Romanov. A request was made for Britain to offer asylum to the deposed emperor, his wife and their five children. Britain’s Prime Minister at the time, David Lloyd George, allegedly vetoed the proposal, on the grounds that as a deposed absolutist the erstwhile tsar did not deserve to receive sanctuary in a democratic country. Denied permission to come to Britain, the former imperial family were stranded, and they were murdered by revolutionaries a year later.I This account was believed for decades by nearly everybody, including the Duke of Windsor and Lord Mountbatten, whose aunt the Tsarina Alexandra had gone to her death at Ekaterinburg alongside her husband and children.
That version of events endured until Kenneth Rose’s research for his 1983 biography of George V, which proved that the decision to deny the Romanovs refuge in Britain had not come from the Prime Minister, but from the King. George feared that the Russian royals’ unpopularity might prove contagious. He prioritised his crown over their lives, left them at the mercy of their political enemies and encouraged a five-decade-long cover-up that absolved him of complicity.
Given that she married into the Royal Family five years after the Romanovs’ murder, and that even her brother-in-law believed the lie blaming Lloyd George, it is likely that Rose’s bombshell was as much of a surprise to the Queen Mother as it was to everybody else. The truth was, however, a secondary priority for her in this instance, and she allied with her daughter’s Private Secretary, Sir Philip Moore, to have the section on the Romanovs dropped from Rose’s manuscript.6 Efforts first subtle and then firmer were made to discourage Rose. A request was finally made to Elizabeth II that she deny him permission to quote from the relevant documents in the Royal Archives. The Queen refused to be party to the lie and signed on the memorandum “Let him publish.”
Rose was accused by some in the palace of presenting the Romanov revelation in too sensational a light. It would be tempting to say that the Queen Mother’s opposition came from appreciating that the complexities of the 1917 negotiations would be lost in the retelling, which they were. Even today, four decades after Rose’s book, George V’s failure to help Nicholas II remains one of the most frequently cited criticisms of the King, despite context painting a more complex picture.7 There were two revolutions in Russia in 1917. The first, the February Revolution, brought down the monarchy to replace it with a democratic republic; this lasted until the second revolution, in October, which brought Communism to power. The request to shelter the Romanovs was made shortly after the first revolution, when they were in no immediate apparent danger. There was also a near total lack of sympathy for them in Britain. To most on the British Right in 1917, Nicholas II was a feeble incompetent who had allowed his 300-year-old empire to disintegrate through poor leadership, while on the Left the ex-tsar was regarded as a bigoted anti-Semitic tyrant, who had decimated the trade unions and seized every available opportunity to limit democracy until he was overthrown by his exasperated subjects. The silent contempt of the Right meant there was no opposition to the protests of the Left who, in 1917, made it abundantly clear that they did not want Nicholas II living in Britain.
There were many other monarchies in the world aside from Britain’s, even more in 1917 than today. Geographically and politically, it was far easier to move the Romanovs to Norway, ruled by Nicholas and George V’s mutual cousin, King Haakon VII. The British offer was rescinded as royal relatives in Norway, Denmark, Italy, Germany and Spain negotiated about moving “dearest Nicky” to another country. In the interim, the Russian republic sent the imperial family to a village in Siberia, where they were still living when the Communists took power and ordered their murder.
While concerns that Rose’s discovery would be sensationalised through simplification were justified, it is hard to conclude that Elizabeth was guided by these historiographical scruples. She was trying to protect the monarchy and quite simply did not want to see this surprising paper trail brought to the public’s attention. The decision to “let him publish,” and posthumously to exonerate David Lloyd George, was her daughter’s. A success for the Queen Mother would have been ensuring that Rose’s discovery never saw the light of day.
Had the Queen Mother been able to get her hands on the relevant Romanov documents, she might have torched them. She certainly seems to have taken to privacy-preserving pyromania when it came to another royal mystery, as she revealed in her old age while dining with friends. Conversation turned to a persistent rumour that has long divided historians: after the death of her first husband, Prince Albert, in 1861, Queen Victoria had gone into a long mourning during which she suffered terribly from grief, the intensity of which she expected everybody in her family to share. Years later, she recovered through her friendship with a ghillie called John Brown. Rumour had it that the Queen and the ghillie were not just friends but lovers, while others went further and said that Queen Victoria would rather have secretly married a servant than have sex outside of matrimony. The latter theory of a second marriage has long been dismissed as nonsense. However, Elizabeth blithely revealed that she knew for a fact that it was true because, when she was queen, she had found documents at Balmoral that proved that Victoria and Brown had privately and secretly married.
A guest asked her what she had done with this piece of historical gold. Apparently, “her eyes twinkled in a steely way,” as she answered, “I burned the documents.”
Hugo Vickers, her future biographer, first met the Queen Mother when he was a teenager in the 1960s and boarding at Eton, from where he volunteered as a guide at St. George’s Chapel in nearby Windsor Castle. He also began attending Sunday services, where, on a November morning, he met the Queen, holding the hand of her youngest son Prince Edward. The Queen Mother, who hardly ever missed church, billowed into view, accompanied by eighteen-year-old Princess Anne.
Her hand was outstretched as she approached Vickers to ask, “And who are you?”
“Hugo Vickers, Ma’am.”
“Ah, yes,” with recognition.
Vickers was so convinced by her tone that he tried to figure out who might have told Queen Elizabeth about him. It was only as he began his career as a biographer that he realised that the idea that she had known who he was, was “nonsense, of course; it was just her way of putting me at my ease and making me feel special.”
At a dinner party in 1982, he noticed more of her linguistic tricks, such as how she kept politely smiling and chatting to a nearly blind nonagenarian French industrialist, who leant ever further in to make his point until he nearly toppled the Queen Mother into the fireplace. As an increasingly diagonal Queen Elizabeth approached said grate, the rubies of her necklace glinting almost as determinedly as her fixed smile, the industrialist asked her if she might like to join them as guest of honour at another dinner.
“Ah!” the Queen Mother replied with “an angelic smile” and the forefinger of her right hand aloft. “Now, I shall have to look in my book.” (Vickers correctly translated that to mean “No.”)
Vickers was at that stage working on his life of Sir Cecil Beaton, who had died four years earlier. “It was difficult for a homosexual to get [a knighthood],” said a friend of Beaton’s. “But finally the Queen Mother fixed it for him. Several attempts by others had failed.” Despite this and the role his photographs had played in solidifying her public image, she did not attend Beaton’s memorial service. She had considered him a friend until the publication of his diaries, in which, along with numerous compliments about her, were many snide remarks about her weight gain and the state of her teeth. She was sufficiently hurt—as well as embarrassed and angry—that she refused even to send a proxy to represent her at his memorial.
In purple velvet, with a matching hat, and diamond brooch, the 83-year-old Queen Mother—looking “splendid, tremendously well and very fit” according to a congregant—went to Westminster Abbey to unveil a memorial to her late friend, the playwright Sir Noël Coward, who had passed away a decade earlier. Like Cecil Beaton, he had been denied a knighthood on suspicion of his sexuality until the royals directly intervened on his behalf. (He was the son of a piano salesman and so the possibility that snobbery also stood in his way cannot be discounted.) The Queen Mother had hosted Coward’s seventieth birthday party, at which the surprise was Elizabeth II’s query if he would be willing to accept a knighthood from her.
Over the course of their friendship, the Queen Mother visited Coward at Firefly, his villa in Jamaica, where he asked if she would like a serving of his favourite cocktail, a bullshot (cold beef bouillon, Worcestershire sauce, a dash of lemon juice, a small ocean of vodka). She was “delighted” with two. He joined her for weekends at Sandringham, where they sang duets of music hall hits like “My Old Man Said Follow the Van” and Coward’s patriotic propaganda piece from the Second World War, “Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans.” They had first met in the 1920s, although it was his work writing pro-British movies, songs and articles during the war that really solidified their friendship. Coward had also served as secret operative for the British Security Coordination during the war, along with the children’s author Roald Dahl and James Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming. In peace, he returned to the high-society comedies for which he was, and remains, famous.
In the 1950s, Coward was photographed by a journalist travelling on the liner Queen Elizabeth as he returned from America for a West End revival of his plays. The Daily Mirror ran the piece with a brutally mocking commentary on Coward’s outfit, archly asking its readers, “Is the bow-tie too loud? More like Texas than Tooting? Is he showing too much of a rather crumpled silk handkerchief? Are the cuff-links too large, and does a successful playwright really wear a leather belt? Is the jacket too long and too colourful?”
At the theatre, on the day that the horrible article had been published, Coward was invited during the interval to meet the Queen, the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret. The Queen Mother walked straight over to him: “How lovely to see you again. We have been most angry on your behalf. For the press to attack your integrity after all you have done for England, both in the country and out of it, is outrageous, but don’t let it upset you.” He wrote a few years later in his diary, “I have always liked her since we first met in the twenties, and of late years I have come to adore her. She has irrepressible humour, divine manners and a kind heart. My affection for her has gone far beyond royal snobisme. She is also, I am proud and happy to say, genuinely fond of me.”
She was. The monument she unveiled to him in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey carried his name and dates, and the epitaph he had once joked that he would want for himself: A TALENT TO AMUSE.
Wallis, Duchess of Windsor, died in Paris on April 24, 1986, after a long decline in which she was pulverised by Crohn’s disease, quite probably by dementia, and endured elder abuse from her lawyer, Suzanne Blum, who isolated Wallis from those who cared for her. Elizabeth, shockingly, had apparently at last decided to visit Wallis; she told a friend, “When I was last in Paris, I tried to see her, but she was guarded by a dragon and I was told she saw nobody.” Instead, she sent a bouquet, signed In Friendship, Elizabeth.
It is doubtful that Wallis was still cognitively strong enough to register the gesture, even more doubtful that Suzanne Blum would have let her see the flowers, and, of course, equally improbable that Elizabeth meant friendship, even if her attitude had mellowed somewhat since the 1930s and 1940s. In 1968, when the Duke of Windsor was still alive, Elizabeth was touring an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery when she spotted a large photograph of the couple. After a long pause during which she kept staring at it, Cecil Beaton heard Elizabeth say, “They’re happy and really a great deal of good came of it. We have much to be thankful for.” If the full sincerity of the flowers can be questioned, it is nonetheless a lot more in terms of a thaw than she had ever been prepared to consider in the four decades preceding it. Elizabeth attended Wallis’s funeral service with other members of the Royal Family, except Princess Margaret, who told the Queen firmly that she would rather be excused.
The Queen Mother was a huge fan of The Golden Girls, an American sitcom that ran from 1985 to 1992. Set in Miami, its four main characters were a sarcastic divorced teacher called Dorothy who, with her remorselessly tactless Sicilian mother Sophia, rents a room in a house owned by Blanche Devereaux, a promiscuous widow from the Deep South; the other room is rented by Rose, a naïve Minnesotan grief counsellor. Respectively played by Bea Arthur, Estelle Getty, Rue McClanahan and Betty White, the show was ground-breaking for showing women over fifty enjoying themselves and at the centre of the storyline—although Blanche, who introduced herself as “Blanche Devereaux, it’s French for Blanche Devereaux,” insisted that she was thirty-nine and told her granddaughter that a fun nickname to call her in public was “Sis.” The Queen Mother, like millions of viewers, loved it, and the four stars were invited to London to perform scenes from the show at the 1988 Royal Variety Performance, a televised charity fundraiser which is always attended by at least two senior members of the Royal Family.
As the skit got under way, it suddenly dawned on Rue McClanahan that they had not cut some of the more risqué dialogue from the script and that the Queen Mother was sitting on the balcony watching them. When Bea Arthur’s Dorothy asked McClanahan’s Blanche how long she had waited to take a lover after her husband died, Getty’s Sophia chimed in with, “Until the paramedics came.” McClanahan heard the Queen Mother’s laughter and relaxed.
Later, the various acts met with the royal party and the Golden Girls stood next to the Dancing Rockettes. Betty White remembered, “Queen Elizabeth was lovely!” as she complimented them on their performance. The five chatted for a few moments about the show and if they were enjoying their time in London. White joked to the Queen Mother that they were now standing next to some very “lovely girls.” Taking in the sequins of the Rockettes, Elizabeth replied, eyebrow raised, “Oh, yes, lovely bodies,” in an apparently flawless American accent.
Many of the Queen Mother’s guests had their own idiosyncrasies, including Lord Slim, a veteran of the Second World and Korean wars. He liked to greet fellow members of the armed forces with a sharp jab to the abdomen.
Spotting her equerry doubled over and clutching his stomach one afternoon, the Queen Mother said cheerily, “Oh, I see you’ve met Lord Slim!”
The Queen Mother had loved Northern Ireland since her first visit in 1924. In 2019, her grandson Prince Charles told Northern Irish actors Debra Hill and Matt Cassidy that he shared his grandmother’s love for a Belfast bap, a chewy white loaf sold in the local markets with a deliberately burned top that, if thrown at your head, is tough enough to do quite a bit of damage. Those whose teeth have a tenuous relationship with their gums are also best advised to avoid it. Beloved without being considered the fanciest of delicacies in Belfast, it also contains enough carbohydrates to lay waste to the best-intentioned diet.
In 1988, Belfast baps were back on the menu as the Queen Mother made an unannounced visit at the height of the Troubles. It had been only nine years since Prince Philip’s uncle, Lord Mountbatten, was killed in a bomb attack by the IRA. During her previous trip, four years after Mountbatten’s assassination, a stolen copy of Elizabeth’s schedule was found in an abandoned car and a 30lb bomb, manufactured by the IRA, was intercepted before it could be detonated in the crowded centre of Ballymena, a town that the Queen Mother’s itinerary confirmed she would be visiting. To diminish the chances of another assassination attempt, there was almost no advanced publicity for the Queen Mother’s 1988 visit. She was taken from event to event by helicopter rather than travelling on public roads, with their risk of snipers or car bombs.
She carried out several engagements and stayed under heavy guard at the Royal Family’s official residence in Northern Ireland, Hillsborough Castle, a walled Georgian mansion ten miles outside Belfast with famously beautiful gardens and portraits of King George III and Queen Charlotte looming at the entrance.8 The castle had a special emotional significance for the Queen Mother; it had been the home of her sister Rose from 1945 to 1952 when it was the governor’s house, until the largely ceremonial post was abolished in 1973.II During the Hillsborough garden parties that became a fixture of Northern Irish civil and social life, the Queen Mother would give her security team a fright by deviating from the route round the gardens to instead go into the crowds to mingle with them. It had been during her first visit to Belfast, back in 1924, that Elizabeth had resisted being rushed away from greeting the gathered people. Now, in 1988, she told her handlers, “I am not in a hurry. I have time. Time is not my dictator; I dictate to time. I want to meet people.”9
On her last night before returning to England, the Queen Mother was hosting a dinner in Hillsborough’s state Dining Room. A new member of the castle’s staff was a young college graduate from Belfast, who was so nervous serving the Queen Mother—her photograph had been on his parents’ living room wall for as long as he could remember—that he spilled a scalding sauce down her dress.10 Seeing the Queen Mother’s eyes sparkle with pain, he also saw his boss staring at him from the far side of the dining room, in silent yet palpable fury. Convinced that he was about to be fired, that night his boss found him to say, “I was about to give you a very firm talking-to, until Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth sent for me and asked if I would apologise to you from her. She says she accidentally nudged your elbow earlier this evening and made you spill.” David Anderson, head of the Household at Hillsborough, told me years later, “I can tell you, honestly, she did not nudge his elbow and the reason he had a job the next day was because she took the initiative to lie for him.”
The Queen Mother’s presence of mind in saving the young man’s job was even more remarkable given the pace of her dinner drinky-poos, in which she outlasted several members of the military. As was traditional, the dinner featured a Loyal Toast, when the guests stood to raise their glasses to “The Queen.” On this particular evening, after joining in the toast to her daughter, the Queen Mother added her own to “The people of Northern Ireland.” Up the guests’ glasses went once more.
Hillsborough Castle, specifically, is located in County Down.
“To the people of County Down!” the Queen Mother toasted.
The glasses rose; their contents diminished further.
By way of an interesting geographical fact, Northern Ireland consists of six counties.
“To the people of County Antrim!” the Queen Mother continued.
By the time she had individually led toasts to all six counties, rounding things off with County Tyrone, the Queen Mother remained clear-headed, while her guests swayed on their feet and one decimated general ended the evening by throwing up in the Entrance Hall’s umbrella stand.