Years ago, in Kathmandu, I saw a living goddess. Still a child, she sat in a window while crowds gawked at her. Who knew what she was thinking or whether she liked or detested the role that she had been assigned? Queen Elizabeth II was a great distance away not just geographically but also in circumstances – but she presents the same puzzle. True, the living goddess spent her days in a small wooden house on a noisy, dusty street; the Queen in a series of palaces and castles surrounded by great gardens and parklands, with one of the greatest art collections in the world and piles of precious jewels to rival Aladdin’s cave.
Yet both women trod paths that had been chosen for them by fate, whether through karma or descent. Both were the objects of adulation, sometimes hostility, as their observers projected on to them their own biases. Goddess and queen, what were they really like? With the Queen, at least, there were the occasional remarks, a laugh here or a frown there, which give brief hints of a private life away from the unrelenting gaze of the public.
Craig Brown’s wonderfully readable new book is, as the title says, a voyage around the phenomenon of the Queen, rather than a biography. He has done his homework, dutifully reading even the most fawning accounts – an experience like eating candyfloss, he says: “You emerge pink and queasy, but also undernourished.” In fact, he has retrieved a wealth of marvellous details, on the royal corgis, for example, whom he compares to the Corleone clan, in their viciousness and unpredictability.
His more serious object, which he achieves triumphantly, is to explore the impact of the Queen on so many millions of people. And not just in their waking moments but their subconscious too. “Queen of the British psyche,” was Brian Masters’ term. One estimate from the Seventies is that a third of the British dream about the royal family. Her sister, Princess Margaret (the subject of Brown’s 2017 book Ma’am Darling), dreamed frequently that she had made the Queen very angry. A housewife in Leeds dreams of meeting the Queen on a bus and taking her home for a cup of tea. A famous writer, who chooses to remain anonymous, confesses that he sees the Queen in his dreams as the God from whom no secrets are hidden.
For more than 70 years she did her duty, opening parliaments, holding receptions, receiving dignitaries or launching ships. She visited 117 different countries. She gave out over 400,000 honours and sent 45,000 Christmas cards. Scores of dictators and democratic leaders came and went while she was on the throne. She knew 14 American presidents and 15 British prime ministers. Stalin died in 1953, the year she was coronated, and she lived through the collapse of his Soviet Union in 1991. Her coronation was the first to be televised; millions of people bought tiny black and white televisions for the occasion. Her funeral, watched by half the world’s population according to one estimate, was in colour while drones flew over London to get footage of the gigantic crowds.
Those moments, as well as her wedding and her four jubilees, were markers of the passage of time but also the occasion for national reflection. (They were also opportunities for crass commercialism. At her Silver Jubilee some 30,000 separate items were put up for sale and after her death in 2022 a tea bag she had once used sold for $12,000 on eBay.) When the Queen died it was as though a stable and valued monument, like the tree in the Sycamore Gap or Stonehenge, had fallen. She was, said JK Rowling, “a thread winding through all our lives”. A five-mile-long queue stretched through London as people waited patiently to visit her coffin as it lay in state. Scores of sporting events were cancelled and at one primary school Guinea Pig Awareness Week was postponed.
In her lifetime she was not above criticism. The initial reserved reaction of the royal family to the death of Princess Diana was widely attacked in the press and among the public. The then prime minister Tony Blair described the public mood as “menacing”. Throughout her life the Queen was frequently mocked for her conversational gambits – “Have you come far?” – and for so often murmuring “how interesting”. “Her Majesty’s a pretty nice girl,” sang the Beatles when they were young and cheeky, “but she doesn’t have a lot to say.” She had learned early on that simple questions and commonplaces were safest. In longer conversations, as the emperor of Japan once complained, she often talked about dogs and horses. (She found that he talked mainly about his tropical fish.) She was always being watched, often accused of being bored or grumpy. “I’ve the kind of face that if I’m not smiling, I look cross,” she once said.
Wherever she went she walked on new carpets, smelled fresh paint or saw newly planted flower beds. Once in Totnes, guests were advised to stand in a semi-circle to hide the entrance to the men’s lavatory from the royal gaze. At her coronation the pre-eminent royal commentator, Richard Dimbleby, “the Gold Microphone-in-Waiting”, pioneered a special back-to-front sentence for describing her. “The moment of the Queen’s crowning is come,” he intoned from his box behind the high altar in Westminster Abbey.
One of the many delights of Brown’s book is his exploration of the extraordinary effect her mere presence had on people: she was, as he puts it, like a mirror reflecting her observers back on themselves. “To watch a line of some of the most powerful people in the world waiting to be introduced to the Queen,” said the poet Ben Okri, “was to watch something unreal, the visible form of the magnetic power of the moon on the tides.” (When the prominent left-wing playwrights John Osborne, Harold Pinter and David Hare met at a Buckingham Palace reception all said they were there because of their wives.) As they first saw the Queen people often felt slightly woozy, as if a well-known portrait had come alive. Kingsley Amis was so afraid of farting – or worse – in the royal presence that he gave up eating beans for weeks and gobbled down anti-diarrhoea tablets. People found themselves behaving strangely, roaring with fake laughter, their gestures too broad.
If the Queen asked them a question, even the most self-confident found themselves babbling inanely or, for some reason, telling lies. When a young Brown met her he found himself giving her an extensive lecture on English humour. Phil Collins, the rock star, found himself whistling a tune but when the Queen asked him what it was he couldn’t answer. “What came over me?” he asked the radio presenter Terry Wogan. It was, replied Wogan, the “Royal Effect” where “you say the first thing that comes into your head, and you carry the memory of your foolishness with you to the grave”.
In her own fashion the Queen played a role as successful monarchs have done through the ages. She too was surrounded by mystery and rituals, even recently invented ones such as parts of the coronation ceremony. For most of her reign the Queen was supported, with the occasional firework, by Prince Philip, who had created his own public persona as a bluff English naval officer, although his complicated family background and his intellectual curiosity were rather different. She had imagined being an actress once, she said to the then French president François Hollande. Perhaps, replied Hollande, she had become one. Yes, she admitted, “but always the same role.”
Yet when there was talk at the start of the new century of the Queen stepping aside in favour of Prince Charles, a courtier told Max Hastings that he and his fellow journalists just didn’t get it. “She likes being Queen.” Mostly. Perceptively, Brown wonders if part of her love for her corgis was that they did exactly what they wanted. Her passion for horse-racing may have been because it too was unpredictable. For someone who was always expected to be so cautious it meant, he says, “she could be spontaneous, excitable and competitive”. And competitive she was, ruthlessly discarding horses and trainers if they weren’t winning.
Occasionally the woman behind the role peeps out. In the Christmas speech of 1992, the year Princess Anne got divorced, Charles and Diana separated and much of Windsor Castle burned, the Queen talked about how, like other families, hers has had some difficulties. More recently, when the Sussexes lobbed accusations of royal racism from California, the phrase “recollections may vary” was apparently the Queen’s own. She was obliged to entertain some appalling people, from Idi Amin to the Ceaușescus but made it clear she did not like them. President Donald Trump she found “very rude” and wondered why on Earth his wife stayed married to him. (Trump, inevitably, thought he had been a great success.) There is no danger here of candyfloss overload.
At once sympathetic but clear-eyed, kind but sharp, Brown has given us a serious reflection on the nature of power and why institutions such as the monarchy, in the right hands, can provide a society with stability and a sense of continuity, especially in turbulent times. When faced with the alternatives on offer at the moment, even committed republicans may find themselves reconsidering their position.
Margaret MacMillan is emeritus professor of international history at Oxford University
A Voyage Around the Queen
Craig Brown
4th Estate, 672pp, £25
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[See also: How motherhood was weaponised]
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This article appears in the 21 Aug 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The Christian Comeback