The television lens allows little privacy for the royal expression. As Queen Elizabeth II sat in St Paul’s Cathedral listening to the service for her jubilee in 1977, her face was sombre.
Twenty-five years before, things were different. The clouds of war and austerity were rolling back; there was a new world to build, or so it seemed, aglow with prosperity and social justice.
Popular pundits talked about a new Elizabethan age and rather less popular pundits, who sneered at such things, seemed strangely out of step with the times. The Queen’s marriage was new, her family young; the future must have seemed to glint ahead excitingly like a castle shining in the early morning mist.
And what happened? The gradual dismantling of empire; the swinging 60s and the troubles of Princess Margaret; continuing irritating miseries about the economy; this was not the lion that saved the world roaring in grandeur, but a mangy old beast arguing with its keeper about the meat supply. Even the utilitarian world we were supposed to be building seemed to have gone rusty at the edges, lying in the harshness of daylight like a disused factory. No wonder she looked glum.
She was still looking grave as she left St Paul’s and stepped “out of God’s blessing into the warm sun”, and began, as monarchs before her had not done, to walk about among the crowds. Slowly, her expression relaxed and she began to look a little happier, then to light up. Whatever promise the years had broken, this she had: these people wanted her, liked her, valued her. The jubilee cameras said it all.
Now she is 60; she has been ruling for 34 years. We will have the celebrations again and she will look – well, radiant, what else do you say about the Queen? And once again we wonder what on earth it is that makes a queen a success, and what place a sovereign has at all in a supposedly modern and logical society. We shall go on trying, probably without much success, to sort out the difference between the monarch and the woman: a tricky enough task even if you are sorting the mogul from the man, the dancer from the girl above the ballet shoes. Asking now what she would have been like if she hadn’t been the Queen seems as pointless as asking what Menuhin would have been like if he’d been tone deaf.
What you can ask is how much the set of monarchy as it is now is her own personal achievement; and what, indeed, she represents to the people who will buy a magazine in thousands if it has her face on the front. What makes her different from a first lady or, for that matter, the Virgin Mary? (In the opinion of Robert Lacey, royal biographer, we have sneaked Mariolatry in again through the back door by giving such reverence to a queen.)
It isn’t difficult to distinguish the Queen from Miss World or a pop heroine. Quite apart from not having to appear in body-hugging spangles, she doesn’t die like a butterfly at the end of her hot short season and she has a far wider appeal. She’s different, too, from a Jackie Kennedy or a Nancy Reagan, because their consort roles are set: they had no choice but to be charming and they’re also temporary.
Elizabeth II’s grasp on the national subconscious might well seem in line with a mother-goddess role – an astonishing 65% of us apparently dream about her (including, so it is said, Alec Guinness and Judi Dench). Certainly, the idea of an anointed monarch is quite irrational enough to get mixed up with religion. The Queen herself took her coronation to be a deeply religious experience and had the Duchess of Norfolk do her rehearsing for her, up and down, over and over again, because it would have been sacrilegious to go through the motions herself. You certainly can’t understand the monarchy (or most other human institutions) unless you realise what an enormous amount of deep-down illogical sentiment goes into our most workaday actions; but goddesses don’t have to go around opening hospitals and taking unkind criticism about their hats. A sacred person per se only has to be, but the Queen’s own view is “I have to be seen to be believed”.
What do people see in the Queen? The delicious paradox, for those who go all misty-eyed when they meet her, is that they think of her as a being from another world, but then are quite overcome when she turns out to be human after all. If the Queen remarks that it’s chilly for the time of year, onlookers note ecstatically that she talks just like a real person. Anyone who says anything disparaging about the royals gets hate letters of a violence that makes one wonder if the senders are quite sane. Otherwise sensible people go around saying “the royal family can’t answer back” which, given they have a well-equipped press office, a speech-making programme to make a Kissinger wilt and could claim to be the first television monarchs, is clearly nonsense. The insight that tells the royal family it would be a mistake to answer back (a very different thing) is simply part of their shrewd perception of what best leaves their dignity intact.
But it’s a mistake to write off people’s apparently unhinged joy in their royalty as simply unreconstructed conservatism, a passion for tradition and the olde worlde akin to that which has them gawping their way round stately homes or bumping their heads on low beams at Stratford-upon-Avon. It’s more interesting than that. Nobody is rational at all levels where old race memories twang, where ancient loyalties stir. And the feeling that anyone may have for belonging to one country or tribe and not another, for feeling “this is my team, these are my people”, exists as a deep territorial imperative – as the Falklands factor, which took most of the more rational analysts by surprise, obviously showed.
This feeling needs a permanent embodiment which no politician can supply. It’s a good deal easier to be moist eyed about a family, to mix them up in a warm, subliminal way with feelings about childhood and Christmas and the olden days. It is a measure of the Queen’s success that she has seemed to embody what the most ordinary among her subjects want – and one of the things they want is a certain amount of dignity, mystery even. Those who know her insist that she’s extremely amusing in private. It doesn’t come out in any of her public utterances, because she doesn’t think a jokey sovereign is what the people want.
Some may think it would be splendid if the Queen chose different interests: smarter clothes, the opera, less mundane productions for command performances – but she knows better. You could say horses and dogs are not exactly the preoccupation of most of her subjects, either, but horses and dogs go with their idea of how royalty should carry on; opera they would view with dark suspicion.
Elizabeth succeeds not by being like them, but by being like their idea of what a queen should be. For, of course, her life is nothing like theirs. It’s a quarter of a mile between her kitchens and her dining room; if she wants to see a film she can do so in her own 60-seat movie theatre; and while it’s true that a string of racehorses may be normal for millionaires, it’s not for the millions who warm to the awful headscarf and the sweet for the horses in the Mackintosh pocket. Her skill in controlling her short-tempered dogs may be ordinary enough, but when a dog got a pin in its paw at a dress fitting, Hardy Amies gave her a satin-covered magnet to pick it out with. The presents she gets beggar description; jewels, pictures, animals – including a pair of baby hippos and a baby crocodile in a silver biscuit barrel which had to spend its nights in a long-suffering equerry’s bath.
It’s ironic that we all want to believe in the fantasy of the drama queen, but coupled with an ordinariness with which we can identify. We want a queen who wears a gem-studded crown at one end and old bedroom slippers at the other; and it is for hitting this mixture for the most part dead right that this queen deserves congratulations. As Harold Nicolson said about Queen Victoria: “Her subjects could feel that in any crisis she was weeping the same salt tears into the same over-strong tea as they were.’’
The Queen embodies not the norm, but what Matthew Arnold called the Sunday-best morality of people: their idea of what a good woman ought to be like. She’s at the top of a system of restraints that would have woefully broken down in your case or mine, but that must surely be going on somewhere – people want their sovereign to be better behaved, more restrained, more reliable in much the same way that a parent is.
The Queen can surely take credit for having done the job in the way that she thought it should be done: indefatigably touring the Commonwealth, keeping her dignity, staying in touch with a great part of the population, choosing a style that doesn’t frighten people or repel them.
In 1066 and All That, Sellar and Yeatman have Warwick the Kingmaker setting a test-paper for sovereigns: “Do you intend to be (a) a good king; (b) a bad king; (c ) a weak king?” Even a good king, in our day, is apt to look weak, because he’s simply not allowed to exercise that much power. A woman, though, can be an earth mother figure, like Mother Courage or the great Ma in The Grapes of Wrath, holding us all together, reassuring us that come what may, the family will still endure. There is a good in us yet, her patience implies: we will come good in the end.
Katharine Whitehorn became the Observer’s fashion editor in 1960, and its first female columnist in 1963. She continued writing for the paper until 2017
