Q: A Voyage Around the Queen

by Craig Brown

No one in human history lived a more chronicled life than the Queen.1 We can chart her movements, on an almost daily basis, from the moment she was born to the moment she died. There was barely a week in her ninety-six years when she was not photographed, often by hundreds or even thousands of people. In no time at all we can find out where she was and what she was doing on just about any day in her long, long life. We know who her great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents were, their characters and habits, their successes and failures, their likes and dislikes, the rumours surrounding them. We know her cousins and her sister and her uncles and her aunts. We know her children, and their children, and their children, and many of us hold strong opinions about this one or that. Like it or not – like them or not – the Royal Family are under our skin.

King George V was born in 1865, twenty-five years before my grandfather, and died in 1936, just four years before him. It seems shameful that I should know so much about King George V and so little about my own grandfather. The same goes for my mother. She was born a fortnight after Princess Margaret, but I know much more about Princess Margaret’s childhood and youth – her nannies, her pets, her boyfriends, her relationship with her parents – than I do about my mother’s. And I know more about the Queen’s children than I do about my own siblings, though we are roughly their ages: in fact my two younger brothers are exactly the same ages as Prince Andrew and Prince Edward.

There are even times when I wonder if I know more about the Queen and her family than I do about myself. What was I doing on a given day in, say, 1968 or 1979 or 1994? What did I do last year, or last month? I can easily find out what the Queen or Prince Charles or Meghan Markle got up to, but my own activities have left scarcely a trace. And I know their faces better than my own, as I see them more often. If I glimpsed myself in profile across a crowded room would I recognise who it was? Possibly not. But I would certainly recognise, say, Princess Anne, or Princess Anne’s daughter, or Princess Anne’s daughter’s husband. This distribution of attention is absurd, but it is something we must learn to live with. Henry ‘Chips’ Channon5 noted our national obsession with royalty when he was watching the unveiling of a

statue of King George V. Though the ceremony was over in twenty minutes, it was followed by ‘that interminable pause whilst the Royalties greeted each other, interkissed and chatted. It is only in England that a crowd of several thousands can stand happily in the rain and watch one family gossip.’

When the Queen died, a quarter of a century later, even some committed anti-monarchists found themselves moved. Their tears seemed to contradict their beliefs, and they were baffled by this contradiction. But others remained defiantly unmoved. The protesters at the ceremonies in the days after the Queen’s death would probably have agreed with Engels, who regarded monarchism as a ‘loathsome cult’; he deplored the psychological confusion that transforms ubiquity into devotion. ‘Is monarchy a suitable institution for a grown-up nation?’ asked Hilary Mantel, chronicler of the Tudors, before replying to her own question: ‘I don’t know.’

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. They knew it in profile; they knew it head-on; they knew it from above and below; they had seen it refracted through the visions of countless artists and photographers. Their memories carried the imprint of what it had been like ten, twenty, forty, eighty years, ninety years before; they could picture her as a child and a baby. Hers was the most familiar, most photographed face in human history. A few tyrants or celebrities – Chairman Mao, the Beatles, Princess Diana, Donald Trump – may have been snapped as often over a given period, but none of them as frequently throughout their lives: in her case, just short of a century.

So to meet the Queen face to face 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.

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.

Sometimes, people would recognise in her not themselves but a close relation: a mother, sister, aunt or grandmother.

When people spoke of her, they spoke of themselves, and when they dreamt of her, they dreamt of themselves. She was a window into their hopes and anxieties.

The words the Queen spoke often seemed, as if by magic, to vanish into the air. Afterwards, those she encountered could remember only what they had said, and how they had behaved: the Queen’s words would evaporate, leaving her subjects with memories only of themselves.

‘Our current royal family doesn’t have the difficulties in breeding that pandas do, but pandas and royal persons alike are expensive to conserve and ill-adapted to any modern environment. But aren’t they interesting? Aren’t they nice to look at? Some people find them endearing; some pity them for their precarious situation; everybody stares at them, and however airy the enclosure they inhabit, it’s still a cage.’

It is written in the genuflective style still favoured by many of today’s Royal ‘experts’. ‘All the world knows that in their relations with those with whom they come in contact our Princesses reveal a simplicity worthy of their House, a graciousness that is all their own: which is only another way of saying that had they been commoners they would still stand out from others as children of uncommon charm. But few people realise the marked similarity between the unaffected sincerity that so delightfully characterises these Royal but very human children and the cheerful contentment of their dogs.’

Corgis, are, it turns out, an unpredictable, temperamental bunch, one minute cuddly, the next psycho, the Corleones of the dog world.

Corgis were rebellious in a way that Queen Elizabeth II could never be. Their clamour was her refuge, their indifference her comfort. Unlike humans, they were unimpressed by her majesty. Even her children would have to defer to her, bowing or curtsying, walking behind her and so forth. But the behaviour of the corgis was modified by no such deference: she would follow them into the room, rather than vice versa, and if they felt like barking, bark they did. And she, in turn, released from pleasantries, could bark back at them.

Her attachment to her corgis was lifelong and profound, often outlasting her attachment to their human counterparts.

Perhaps, above all, the corgis were a distraction from the constraints of such a formal existence. ‘She has used the dogs not just to put others at their ease, but to ease her own discomfort,’ observes Junor astutely. ‘… If there is an awkward lull, she will turn her attention to one of the dogs to fill the silence, or bend down to give them titbits from her plate at the table.’

12 In the first half of the twentieth century, it was obligatory for men, women and children to stand whenever the National Anthem was played. ‘As children if God Save the King was played on the radio, my parents would have stood up, and so would all of us as children, from quite an early age,’ recalled Bernard Weatherill, a child of the 1920s.1 At the age of eleven, Princess Elizabeth attended a children’s matinee at the Holborn Empire. As she entered, 1,500 children stood up and sang a specially composed children’s verse of the National Anthem. The dirge-like song was to follow her everywhere for the rest of her life. Who knows how she felt, silently listening to crowds imploring God to send her victorious, happy and glorious, sometimes at a rate of twice a day? Her invariable response was to look thoughtful but unconcerned, keeping her eyes ahead, as though waiting patiently for a bus. Only radical elements among the intelligentsia sniffed at the practice of standing to attention while it played. ‘It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during “God Save the King” than of stealing from a poor box,’ observed George Orwell in 1941. From time to time in the immediate post-war period, there were rumblings against the bellicose second verse. In 1948, a radio listener from Christchurch, New Zealand, put a question to the panel of the Brains Trust on the BBC

Regardless of such niggles, throughout the 1940s and 1950s only the very drunk, the defiantly radical or the fast asleep would remain seated for the National Anthem, which was played at the end (and sometimes also at the beginning) of most public entertainments throughout the Commonwealth.

But by the early 1960s the playing of the National Anthem with such frequency was beginning to be questioned. On an episode of radio’s Any Questions in 1962, Michael Foot MP argued against it being played in theatres and cinemas. He was opposed by Lady Isobel Barnett3 and by the extravagantly moustachioed Conservative MP Gerald Nabarro, who insisted that ‘it should be played on all

The hollering continued after the Beatles had left the stage, but the moment the National Anthem came on, all the girls stopped screaming and stood stock still, as rigid as ramrods, until the final note sounded, at which point they all began screaming just as loudly as before. At that time, this routine – scream, stand still for two minutes, scream again – was so failsafe and predictable that the Beatles would take advantage of it to make a speedy getaway through the stage door and into their waiting Austin Princess. Meanwhile even the most ardent fans remained inside, standing to attention, out of respect for Her Majesty. But, in under a year, everything began to change. After performing in Leicester in October 1964, the Beatles attempted to execute their old trick but, this time, a group of sixty or seventy fans proved less obedient, rushing out of the auditorium while the National Anthem was playing, and swarming around the Beatles in their car, hammering on the roof and windows, causing their driver to career into another car. Ambushed by fans, the four Beatles were forced to wait for the police to come and set them free, the heralds of a less ordered society now also its hostages. Despite these outcrops of rebellion, the National Anthem was still being played on occasions great and small in 1968.

By the 1970s, the Queen was in her forties, and the old reverence surrounding her theme tune was fast unwinding.

1977, the Sex Pistols chose to greet the Queen’s Silver Jubilee by forcing the familiar words ‘God Save the Queen’ to rhyme first with ‘fascist regime’, then with ‘she ain’t no human being’ and finally with ‘not what she seems’. By now, the National Anthem had come to symbolise the old-fashioned and the fuddy-duddy: theatres and cinemas had long abandoned it, even the grandest of them only bothering to play it if the Queen herself was present. But, as often happened in the history of the British monarchy, the pendulum swung back, rebellion was subsumed into tradition, and scorn replaced by respect.

Slowly but surely, the lives of Alathea and Elizabeth were moving apart, wrenched by etiquette and protocol. Can one ever really be friends with a princess?

In the character of Alathea, there is sometimes a smidgin of Annie Wilkes, the deranged fan in Stephen King’s novel Misery: she worships Lilibet but is also exasperated by her, turning an unforgiving eye on her imperfections.

Three months later, she still considered her relationship with Princess Elizabeth less intimate than it might have been. She recognised in the teenage Elizabeth an emotional detachment and social reserve that would later come to define her character. ‘PE was sweet today and said it was a pity that they didn’t see more of me now (whose fault is that?) but I wish she wasn’t so dispassionate – royalty are not always like that. No such things as vows of eternal friendship could ever pass between us – I happen to be part of her surroundings, taken for granted while I am there, but she shows no desire to talk or exchange thoughts and ideas with one of her own age. Her temperament is quite unsuited to forming strong or violent attachments – no doubt this is a blessing in one of her position and she is wholly fitted for being a queen nowadays…’ Lilibet was also, in Alathea’s eyes, recklessly egalitarian, going camping with commoners, ‘which I thoroughly disapprove of – it’s outrageous and undignified and I think the Queen is wrong to allow it … I think democracy is responsible for this, but if it is carried to this pitch, royalty will lose the last remaining prestige that still remains to it. But the modern world is not suited to kings, and if I were one, no doubt I should cause a revolution!’

Who was he? Like many actors prominent on our national stage, Prince Philip created a convincing character for himself – quizzical, bluff, tetchy, no-nonsense – at an oblique angle to his upbringing, which was far from straightforward. He was born in Corfu, on the kitchen table of a house called Mon Repos. His family might have been the creation of David Lynch or Charles Addams. His great-uncle George had conducted a long affair with his own uncle, Waldemar. His mother’s father had a tattoo of a dragon stretching from his chest to his legs. According to one biographer, one of his aunts, Marie Bonaparte, ‘twice underwent an unusual procedure to alter the position of her clitoris to bring it closer to the point of penile contact’. In 1930, when he was eight years old, his mother Alice was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, suffering from ‘a neurotic pre-psychotic libidinous condition’. Sigmund Freud himself examined her and proposed reducing her libido through the use of X-rays. But her condition persisted, and she was committed to a sanatorium on Lake Constance.

All that he left to his son were some old trunks containing clothing, a shaving brush, cufflinks and a signet ring. Philip wore that signet ring for the rest of his life.

From the age of 11 up to the time of his marriage, Philip was of no fixed abode. Hovering in the foreground throughout his gothic childhood, like the nurse in Romeo and Juliet, was his mother’s

brother, Lord ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten, whose Olympian talents for social climbing meant he never let the world’s highest summit out of his sight: with deft use of all the right ropes, maps, hammers and crampons, he strove to guide the dashing and suitably royal but virtually penniless Philip into marriage with the future Queen Elizabeth II. ‘His vanity, though child-like, was monstrous, his ambition unbridled,’ wrote his authorised biographer. Under the guiding hand of Mountbatten, Philip’s education seems to have been designed to dispel any lingering whiff of the louche, the fascistic or the bohemian.

Getting on with it was to become Philip’s guiding principle; he had little time for those who failed to get on with it, whatever it might happen to be.

He was, by nature, a moderniser, impatient to make things more streamlined and up to date. Yet the monarchy prided itself on being slow and old-fashioned. It represented the world of yesterday, serving its subjects by keeping the future at bay.

Prince Philip was in many ways a tweedy saloon-bar philosopher, a combustible keg of forthright and often cranky opinions, robustly delivered. He was driven by instinct to adopt the contrary position: talking to a leading Shakespearian he was insistent that Henry Neville was the true author of the plays. The day after watching Tom Jones at the 1969 Royal Variety Show, he was the lunch guest of the Small Businessmen’s Association. When one of their members said that no one could make a fortune in Britain any more, he replied: ‘What about Tom Jones? He’s made a million and he’s a bloody awful singer.’

He believed in standing on your own two feet. He saw protest as whining and social welfare as a licence for laziness. ‘Just at this moment we are suffering a national defeat comparable to any lost military campaign, and, what is more, self-inflicted,’ he complained in 1961, adding, ‘Gentlemen, I think it is about time we pulled our fingers out.’

The word ‘gaffe’ clung to him. His supporters argued that, far from being gaffes, they were conversational jump-starts: Philip would say something punchy in the hope of receiving something punchy in return. In the few minutes allotted, this would allow a conversation to leapfrog the usual platitudes of where-have-you-come-from and what-do-you-do into more exciting territory.

His life could be measured out in gaffes, many of them elevated to some kind of immortality in anthologies of quotations.

The Queen’s father and grandfather both had quick tempers, and were prone to overstatement. When a Buckingham Palace footman dropped a tray, King George V screamed, ‘That’s right! Break up the whole bloody Palace!’

He was a bull in a china shop, a man holding forth in a role predicated on holding

His intellectual curiosity, and instinctive iconoclasm, could send him into crackpot territories: in the 1950s, he subscribed to the Flying Saucer Review. But the Queen learned both to tolerate his views and to stand up to his barracking.

Sometimes, the Queen was the more crafty one, almost like a mother with an errant son, or, if you will, a handler with her corgi. She was alert to the benefits in distraction.

Philip’s own father had been absent from his childhood, and his mother was far from maternal. Small wonder, then, that he himself subscribed to the stand-on-your-own-two-feet school of parenting. As an old lady, his mother lived in Buckingham Palace dressed as a nun, having invented her own Order. ‘Wearing the habit meant that she did not have to worry about clothes or getting her hair done,’ explained Philip, matter-of-factly. Throughout his life, he steadfastly refused to analyse his parents, or their effect on his own character. His peppery best-foot-forward persona was entirely a product of his own imagination and willpower; despite the odd blip, it served him well.

Correct behaviour, and the fear of transgression, lie at the heart of most of our dreams about the Queen. She knows how to behave, and we don’t. We dread doing the wrong thing, and showing ourselves up. In Freudian terms, she is our super-ego; in Christian terms, our conscience. She herself was brought up to abide by a strict code of behaviour. Whenever the little Princess Elizabeth came to say goodnight to her grandfather, King George V, he expected her to walk backwards towards the door, then curtsy and say, ‘I trust Your Majesty will sleep well.’

Her grandmother, Queen Mary, was equally strict, adhering to the customs of the Victorian age until her death in 1953.

The Queen inherited her parents’ adherence to the rules of protocol and tradition, believing that everyone, high and low, felt more secure for knowing where they stood. Printed cards in the guest bedrooms asked guests ‘to refrain from offering presents of money to the Servants of Her Majesty’s establishment’, while adding that monetary gifts were permitted for the acting valets and ladies’ maids. Tipping the Almighty comes with its own set of rules. Before church each Sunday, the Queen’s dresser would tightly fold a £5 note into a quarter of its size. She would then press it flat with an iron before giving it to the Queen. When the time came for the collection, the Queen would drop the folded note into the box, with her head to the fore.

He soon discovered that ‘everything about the Royal Family, even private mealtimes, is planned, scripted and orchestrated to perfection’. Every tray had a correct layout plan: ‘cup and saucer with handle and spoon pointing towards five o’clock; plates and saucers turned so the royal crests were at twelve o’clock; salt on right, mustard on left with the pepper behind; sugar basin with cubed white sugar, never granulated, and sugar tongs; toast always in a silver toast rack and never on a plate; no more than three balls of butter in the dish’. One of his instructions was that he mustn’t look at anyone in the eye, another that the Royal Family does not like to be watched while eating.

Servants aimed for invisibility. ‘At Sandringham, maids would dart into a walk-in cupboard under the stairs so as not to be seen when the Queen was coming down the main hall.’ Before setting off from Buckingham Palace for the Christmas season, the Queen made a point of having a word with each member of her household staff. Over a period of two hours, she would stand in the Bow Room, receiving each member of her 300 staff individually, from the most junior to the most senior. She would bid them a Happy Christmas, before giving them each a small present that they had previously selected for themselves from a catalogue. All the women would be obliged to wear white cotton gloves, while the Queen, abandoning her usual gloves, received them with bare hands. The Household staff were instructed to avoid physical contact with the Queen.

It made little difference that the origins of these dress codes were obscure or unknown or contradictory; those bold enough to question them were given short shrift. For some, the emphasis on gloves proved a source of particular consternation.

For seventy years, the Christmas broadcast remained remarkably consistent. It was broadcast in Britain at 3 p.m. on Christmas Day, bookended by the National Anthem. There would be a Christmas tree in the background, along with framed photographs of members of the Royal Family, which eagle-eyed observers would treat as indicators of who was in and who was out; in 2021, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex were nowhere to be seen.

The Queen’s accessories changed little over the years. She always wore a watch, pearl earrings and three strings of pearls: only her brooch would vary. Her message too, remained reassuring. Only very occasionally would she make oblique references to shifts in the fortunes of her own family: for instance, in 1992, the year that had seen the end of the marriages of three of her four children and the disastrous fire at Windsor Castle, she said that ‘like many other families we have lived through many difficulties this year’. Her Christmas message always contained references to the Commonwealth. She would talk of the importance of family, send good wishes to those away from home or suffering, and recall the spiritual message of the Christmas story. She would finish by saying, ‘Happy Christmas’, occasionally adding ‘God bless you all.’ The broadcast would close with a shot of the Queen’s flag floating in the wind, to the background music of ‘God Save the Queen’. Just as predictable were the regular mutterings from the intelligentsia that it had grown predictable, and that it would soon become a thing of the past.

Her accent changed with the times, just like everyone else’s. In her 1953 broadcast, ‘had’ rhymes with ‘bed’; thirty years later, it rhymes with ‘bad’. And ‘home’, which once rhymed with ‘tame’, now rhymed with ‘Rome’. She ended her 1954 broadcast by wishing everyone a ‘heppy’ New Year, with ‘happy’ rhyming with ‘preppy’; by 1980, it rhymed with ‘nappy’. In 2000, a team of researchers led by Dr Jonathan Harrington of Macquarie University in Sydney studied all the Queen’s Christmas broadcasts. They published their findings in the Journal of the International Phonetic Association, in an essay breezily titled ‘Monophthongal vowel changes in Received Pronunciation: an acoustic analysis of the Queen’s Christmas Broadcasts’. They concluded that the Queen had gradually made small, almost imperceptible changes to her accent. Over the years, it had inched closer to the accent ‘characteristic of speakers who are younger and/or lower in the social hierarchy’. On the other hand, right to the very end, she continued to say ‘orf’ for ‘off’.