Word of the car crash reached Balmoral Castle, in Scotland, at one o’clock in the morning of August 31, 1997. Word of the death came through at four. Prince Charles was in residence, with his sons; the Queen advised him not to wake them (they would need all their strength), adding, “We must get the radios out of their rooms.” Charles broke the news just after seven. Prince Harry, then twelve, couldn’t quite take it in. Was everyone sure? he asked; would somebody check? The boys were asked if they would like to accompany the family to church. (It was Sunday.) Prince William, then fifteen, wanted to attend—so he could “talk to Mummy.”
“The world’s going to go completely mad,” Charles said, presciently, when he heard. By the following Thursday, the Royal Family was facing the strangest crisis in its history. Certainly, King Egbert (802-39) would not have known what to make of it; and neither did Queen Elizabeth II (1952- ). “We don’t have protocol here,” an eminent courtier once drawled, “just bloody good manners.” But national cohesion, and indeed public order, now depended on a preposterous punctilio: the people wanted a flag flying at half-mast above Buckingham Palace, and the Queen wasn’t having it. Flags were flying at half-mast at other royal seats; the flag at the palace, however, flies only when the Queen is staying there (and she was still in Scotland: a further scandal). The flag at the palace doesn’t go halfway down for anybody’s death, even the monarch’s. Within the inner circle, the dispute was unprecedentedly fearsome. (“A lot of people,” an aide said, “were heavily scarred by it.”) The desperate courtiers were unanimous: the flag must go up. But the Windsors hadn’t yet sensed which way the wind was blowing.
As in all matters royal, we are dealing here not with pros and cons, with arguments and counter-arguments; we are dealing with signs and symbols, with fever and magic. To the Queen, the flag (or its absence) was an emblem of her nonnegotiable inheritance. To her subjects, the flag was an emblem—a display—of grief; and a display of grief was what they were demanding. Prime Minister Tony Blair was onto “the mood” so quickly that you feel he must have partaken of it. Before noon on that same Sunday, he huskily addressed the nation: “We are today a nation, in Britain, in a state of shock, in mourning, in grief that is so deeply painful for us. . . . She was the People’s Princess, and that’s how she will stay, how she will remain in our hearts and in our memories forever.” Now the British newspapers, having cheerfully savaged Diana for years (right up to and including that weekend), were cheerfully at work on her black-bordered canonization. “where is our queen? where is her flag? ” “show us you care.” “your people are suffering. speak to us, ma’am.”
Diana’s funeral was set for Saturday. The Queen had intended to process south, in the royal train, on Friday night. But by now she had adapted to the new reality—had remembered that she was a servant as well as a potentate. She flew down on Friday afternoon; she would speak, she would show us she cared; the flag, which had not been lowered for her father, George VI, would be lowered for Diana. There were heightened fears for the safety of the Queen and Prince Philip when they arrived at Buckingham Palace. Obligingly, they climbed out of their limousine and inspected the shoulder-high heaps of flowers and tributes (“Diana, Queen of Heaven,” “Regina Coeli,” and so on). It was felt that, at the very least, there might be a repetition of Queen Victoria’s experience in her Golden Jubilee year (1887), when she was greeted in the East End by what she called “a horrid noise” she had never heard before: booing. It didn’t happen. Here is Robert Lacey’s account in his exemplary book “Monarch: The Life and Reign of Elizabeth II” (Free Press; $27.50):
Well, not yet. There was also the speech. The Queen would have to come as close as she could bring herself to pretending that she loved Princess Diana.
Lacey is very good on the Queen’s feelings about feelings, the “curious knotting in the impulses” that complicates her expressions of emotion. She could write a passionate four-page letter to a friend in response to a brief commiseration about the violent death of a favorite corgi. This was heartache of a manageable and articulate order. But when, in 1966, a hill of slag collapsed on a village in South Wales, Aberfan, killing a hundred and sixteen children (and twenty-eight adults), the Queen, against all advice and family precedent, delayed her visit for more than a week. Her husband and her brother-in-law went (and so did the P.M., Harold Wilson); but she felt she would be an immodest distraction from the continuing rescue and relief. When she did go (and she has maintained her links with Aberfan), she involuntarily revealed why she had stayed away. In the photographs, you can see the terror, as well as the pity, in her eyes. She was the Queen. And Aberfan: what did that tell her about the state of Great Britain? Monarchical emotion is emotion hugely magnified. It asks for a detachment that Queen Elizabeth only imperfectly commands.
She respects emotion, and cannot fake it. This is one of Lacey’s typically pertinent anecdotes:
One duly notes, however, that she was, nonetheless, sincerely “pleased” to mingle with various humdrum worthies in the dour surrounds of Kingston upon Hull. The woman is adamantine. How could she emote, to order, for the definitively brittle Diana?
It was to be, in effect, her first live televised speech—in two senses. The Queen addressed the people in real time; and she also had to show them the live being, the creature of glands and membranes. She spoke from the Chinese Dining Room in Buckingham Palace. The windows were open, and you could hear the crowd, ten thousand or more, milling and murmuring in the background. An aide asked the Queen, “Do you think you can do it?” And she answered, “If that’s what I’ve got to do.” The countdown began; the floor manager mouthed “Go.”
She was being asked to confront an intense need that she didn’t understand. No one understood it. Deborah Hart Strober and Gerald S. Strober’s “The Monarchy: An Oral Biography of Elizabeth II” (Broadway; $32.50) contains, at this point, entry after entry from assorted insiders expressing blunt incomprehension: “absolutely amazed . . . really amazing . . . beyond my capacity to understand . . . inexplicable . . . astonished . . . staggered,” and so on. And we still don’t understand it. My best guess is that the phenomenon was millennial. Human beings have always behaved strangely when the calendar zeros loom. And Dianamania bore several clear affinities to the excesses described in (for example) Norman Cohn’s “The Pursuit of the Millennium”: it involved mass emotion; it exalted a personage of low cultural level; it was self-flagellatory in tendency; and it was very close to violence. The phenomenon was, then, part of mankind’s cyclical festival of irrationality.
“So what I say to you now,” Elizabeth II made clear, “as your Queen and as a grandmother, I say from my heart.” It was an extraordinary performance: she gave a near-pathological populace what it wanted, while remaining true to her own self. Of the two words they most needed to hear, she allowed them one (“grief”), but not the other (see below). She didn’t sell her integrity to the yearnings of the many. Nor did she attempt the solace of aphoristic eloquence. Curiously enough, she saved that for the events of September 11th: “Grief is the price we pay for love.” One final, mangled irony: Diana’s boyfriend, Dodi Fayed, was an Egyptian Muslim. “To Diana and Dodi,” read the inscription on one floral tribute, “together in heaven.” Which heaven?
And it was not yet over. With the Windsors, a familial drama inevitably becomes a national drama; but the drama had now become global. At dinner on Friday, it was still uncertain whether the two young princes would walk behind the gun carriage that held their mother’s coffin; and “their composure,” as Lacey notes, “would be the pivot on which the whole occasion turned.” The struggle, once again, was not to divulge emotion but to master it. This was a heavy call on their courage, and, of the two, Prince William was the more uncertain. The royal, the kingly thing, plainly, was to walk. Prince Philip, who had not intended to join the cortège, finally asked his grandson, “If I walk, will you walk with me?” And William walked.
If we are to tiptoe into the psyches of the royals, we must first understand that they were all world-famous babies. Driven out of the Royal Mews in an open carriage for her regular airings, the diapered Elizabeth drew large crowds of cheering, waving admirers; one of her earliest skills was to wave back. She made the cover of Time at the age of three. The first biography, “The Story of Princess Elizabeth,” appeared when she was four. “She has an air of authority & reflectiveness astonishing in an infant,” wrote Winston Churchill, who would be the first of her ten Prime Ministers. As the Queen celebrates her seventy-sixth birthday, she can reflect that the only time she misbehaved in public was at her christening. She cried throughout, and had to be dosed with dill water.
And the Princess was, at this stage, a minor royal. She was the granddaughter of George V (whom she called Grandpa England), and the niece of the heir apparent, Edward, Prince of Wales. The King died in January, 1936, when Elizabeth was nine. On December 10th, Edward VIII signed the “Instrument of Abdication” (in order to marry the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson), and, in his later wanderings, became a living example of royal futility. The ten-year-old now became the heir presumptive. While her father, who was suddenly George VI, went off to the Accession Council on December 12th, Princess Elizabeth and her sister, Princess Margaret, were given a refresher course on their curtsy by their governess, Marion Crawford; on his return they greeted him with this formality, and it jolted him. “He stood for a moment touched and taken aback. Then he stooped and kissed them both warmly,” Crawford wrote. “Does that mean you’re going to be Queen?” was a question Margaret put to her sister. “Yes, I suppose it does,” said Elizabeth. “Poor you,” said Margaret. Their grandmother Lady Strathmore noticed that Elizabeth had started “ardently praying for a brother.”
Prince Philip of Greece was her third cousin, and she had known him, slightly, since childhood. The coup de foudre seems to have come when she was thirteen and he was an eighteen-year-old cadet—and the Second World War was six weeks away. Although penniless and homeless, and a nomad all his life, Philip could boast a sensational pedigree (he had a great-great-grandmother in common with Elizabeth: Queen Victoria). His broke father moped in Monte Carlo. His deaf mother fancied that she was the mistress of both Jesus Christ and Buddha; Freud himself advised radiation of the ovaries “to accelerate the menopause.” The mental frailty of Diana Spencer has sometimes been attributed to her unhappy childhood. Much more graphic insecurity had the opposite effect on Philip, investing him with a brisk, and sometimes brusque, self-sufficiency. Elizabeth knew what she would be needing in a husband—a source of strength. And this was the strength that Philip was still able to offer his grandsons, nearly sixty years later, on that Saturday in 1997.
Philip and Elizabeth both had a “good” war, Philip distinguishing himself on the battleship Valiant, Elizabeth forming part of the royal tableau vivant of national solidarity. (Hitler called her mother “the most dangerous woman in Europe.”) They corresponded, and there were visits to Windsor and elsewhere when Philip was on leave. Early in 1947, Elizabeth went abroad for the first time, to South Africa; the idea was to train her up for royal responsibilities but also to test the constancy of her feelings for Philip, to whom she was now unofficially engaged. On April 21st, her twenty-first birthday, she addressed the Empire and the Commonwealth, and the speech was to be broadcast from Cape Town. “It has made me cry,” she admitted, after reviewing the final draft. Elizabeth was talking to her people, but one suspects that she was also talking to her future husband: