Elizabeth the Queen:
The Life of a Modern Monarch
By Sally Bedell Smith
Random House,
688 pages

The 60th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II’s accession to the throne of Britain has produced a predictably large slew of books, most of them pretty worthless scissors-and-paste jobs or photo collections. One exception is British royal historian Robert Hardman’s superb Our Queen, to be published in America as Her Majesty in April, and another is by Sally Bedell Smith, the American blockbuster biographer. Both have interviewed a large number of courtiers off-the-record, and the result is something I had thought well nigh impossible: good, new anecdotes about the queen that have the added advantage of probably being true.

Because the queen has never given an interview, and whenever she’s on official duty (which is almost always) she is constitutionally duty-bound to say only words that her ministers have written for her, her private personality remains enigmatic. That is why biographers of this kind completely rely on the Buckingham Palace insiders to give them snippets, and Bedell Smith—whose previous subjects have included Pamela Harriman, the Kennedys, and the Clintons—has certainly been favored with some privileged access. This was undoubtedly helped by the fact that, very much unlike those previous subjects, there was absolutely no sexual element involved.

Princess Elizabeth was 10 years old when a footman informed her that her uncle King Edward VIII had abdicated. Her sister, Princess Margaret, asked, “Does that mean that you will have to be the next queen?” Elizabeth answered: “Yes, some day.” “Poor you,” replied Margaret. Elizabeth has spent the last three-quarters of a century dutifully, with consummate professionalism, and without a single outburst, tantrum, or rant. (Unlike Princess Margaret.) 

So what makes the queen tick? Apart from her love of the countryside, horses, Prince Philip, the Commonwealth, and the Book of Common Prayer, she seems genuinely to enjoy the endless work. Aged 85, she undertook 387 public engagements last year, 20 years past the age at which most of her subjects start collecting their old-age pensions. The British historian John Julius Norwich says that the secret to her equanimity is “never having to look for a parking space,” but in fact she’s a workaholic who takes noblesse oblige to hitherto unimagined levels. She lost her beloved father, King George VI, when she was 25 and has spent the past 60 years trying to show him what a fine successor she could be.

Physical sturdiness helps. “Elizabeth II could literally feel the weight of duty,” writes Bedell Smith of the 1953 Coronation, “between her vestments, crown, and scepter, more than 45 pounds’ worth on her petite frame.” (The crown she wears when opening parliament has 3,000 diamonds and weighs almost 3 pounds. She wears it on the evening before the ceremony to get used to it.) One courtier told the author: “She’s got very good legs and she can stand for a long time. The queen is as tough as a yak.” It’s true that she can stand stock still for hours on end in public ceremonies in all kinds of weather, and while other heads of state half her age start shifting their weight from foot to foot—either through boredom or lack of comfort—Britons feel proud that theirs resembles the Rock of Gibraltar. 

Then there’s her courage: When Prince Andrew went to war in the Falklands, when an intruder broke into her bedroom at Buckingham Palace, and when a deranged youth fired six shots (that turned out to be blanks) at her during her 1981 Birthday Parade, she behaved with valor. During the shooting incident, not knowing whether or not she was in mortal danger, she brought her startled horse, Burmese, under control, patted its neck, and continued on as if nothing had happened. “It was the first time that the public had witnessed the unflinching physical courage that friends and courtiers had seen privately,” comments Bedell Smith. The Daily Express reported the next day: “In every pub and club throughout the land the verdict is the same. Her Majesty showed guts.” Courage is the attribute the British of her wartime generation tend to admire above all others; her father fought at the battle of Jutland, and her mother visited bomb sites throughout the London Blitz. She thus appreciated the sangfroid showed by Margaret Thatcher in 1985 when the IRA blew up the Grand Hotel in Brighton in an attempt to assassinate her. When the queen, who was on holiday in America, telephoned her prime minister hours after the bomb, Thatcher’s first words to her were, “Are you having a lovely time?”

Perhaps surprisingly for someone who was brought up in upper-class circles in the 1930s, and especially considering the nationality of her mother’s ultimate bête noire, Wallis Simpson, the queen doesn’t have a trace of the anti-Americanism that was rife in people of her age and class before the war. “She has a great soft spot for the United States,” says a courtier, and her favorite way to relax is visiting the stud farms of Lexington, Kentucky, with her friends William Farrish, the former U.S. ambassador to London, and his wife, Sarah. When Gerald Ford started off the dancing at the White House ball given in her honor during the bicentennial celebrations in 1976 with the song “The Lady Is a Tramp”; or when George W. Bush recalled that visit as having taken place in 1776, a gaffe about which he later joked, “she gave me a look only a mother can give a child”; or, worst of all, when President Obama kept putting his hand on her back—something she abhors—the queen never wavered in her belief in the Special Relationship.

Diana, Princess of Wales, comes out fairly badly from this eminently fair-minded account, with her manipulations of the media and occasional untruths laid bare. Her high-profile charity work after her divorce must now be seen in the context of her comment to Tony Blair, whom she told “in fairly calculating terms how she had ‘gone for the caring angle.’” Bedell Smith also dispels the rumor that Prince Philip has been unfaithful to the queen, quoting their mutual cousin Pamela Hicks as saying that the prince “flirts with everyone, and she knows it means absolutely nothing.” Sarah Bradford, the biographer who first alleged his infidelities in 1996, has now told the Times of London: “Quite honestly, what real evidence is there?” This book teaches us that State coaches are drafty and uncomfortable, that the queen didn’t watch Helen Mirren in The Queen because she didn’t want to be reminded of the week of Diana’s death, and that she was temporarily flummoxed when a lady asked her, “What do you do?” She admitted to courtiers, “I’d no idea what to say.” It tells us that she thoroughly enjoys those rare occasions when protocol breaks down, and that she was deeply shocked and distressed during the Irish Troubles of the 1970s.

The only time when the queen’s iron self-control and supremely British stiff upper lip deserted her was on December 11, 1997. She was seen to shed a tear at the decommissioning ceremony for the royal yacht Britannia, on which she had spent her honeymoon. So the only people to make Her Majesty cry in public over the past six decades were those penny-pinching politicians who forced her to abandon her beloved boat on grounds of cost, at exactly the same time, it now turns out, that they themselves were busy padding their own parliamentary expenses. The theme of this Diamond Jubilee should be: “Britain doesn’t deserve you, your Majesty.”