Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

The Queen fully supported the decisions by William and Harry to enter the military. “It is a traditional thing to do, a good thing to do,” explained Charles Guthrie, who discussed it with her. “It teaches a lot about leadership. It mixes up royals with different examples of society, people from poor backgrounds, which is helpful and certainly very good.” Choosing the army rather than the navy, where the princes’ father, uncle, and grandfather had served, reflected the practical reality of modern warfare and the decline of Britain’s importance as a naval power. The military gave William and Harry jobs that kept them away from the limelight—and the press.

The imposition of discipline in the context of regimental camaraderie was particularly good for Harry, whose high spirits threatened to turn him into a scapegrace. He got caught using marijuana when he was seventeen, prompting his father to march him off to visit a drug rehabilitation center and listen to recovering addicts. There were other unfortunate incidents involving the third in line to the throne—sightings of drunkenness at London clubs and at a costume party where Harry wore a swastika armband. Because of his red hair and freckles, it had long been rumored that his father was James Hewitt—despite the well-documented fact that Diana didn’t meet the cavalry officer until after Harry was born. While Diana strongly resembled her maternal grandmother, Ruth Fermoy, she scarcely looked like her father’s side of the family. Harry, however, inherited the ginger looks of the Spencers.

It was first proposed early in 2007 that Harry be posted to Iraq. He was determined to serve with his regiment, but when publicity about the prospect led to terrorist threats against him, Army Chief of Staff Sir Richard Dannatt vetoed his participation. The Queen had favored his deployment, and she helped talk Harry through his frustration. She supported his resolution to “turn to the right and carry on,” he recalled.

When the Blues and Royals regiment was called to Afghanistan later in the year, Dannatt consulted with Gordon Brown, the Prince of Wales, and the Queen. They decided to deploy Harry under an embargo reached with selected news organizations that agreed to publicize the details of his experience once he had returned safely to Britain. As with her decision to back Andrew twenty-five years earlier, the Queen didn’t hesitate. She broke the news to her grandson in December on a weekend at Windsor Castle. “I think she’s relieved that I get the chance to do what I want to do,” he said at the time. “She’s a very good person to talk to about it.”

From his arrival only days before Christmas, Harry served on the front lines at a forward operating base under regular fire from machine guns, snipers, rockets, and mortars. He called in air strikes and routinely went out on foot patrol through dangerous Taliban-held terrain. As a troop leader responsible for eleven soldiers doing reconnaissance work, he was undeniably in danger. At the same time, he was “‘mucking in’ with every other soldier, cooking his own rations, taking his turn making brews for himself and his mates, cleaning his rifle and equipment,” wrote Colonel Richard Kemp, former commander of British forces in Afghanistan.

The secret of his deployment held for ten weeks, until an Australian magazine and a German newspaper broke the blackout, and an American website, the Drudge Report, picked up the news. The Ministry of Defence withdrew Harry from Helmand, at least in part to ensure the safety of his battle group. Before leaving, the prince said, “All my wishes have come true. I managed to get the job done.” He was also grateful, he said, because “it’s very nice to be sort of a normal person for once. I think it’s about as normal as I’m going to get.”

THE FINAL MONTHS of 2007 marked the appearance of another work of fiction that captured the public imagination about the Queen. In The Uncommon Reader, Alan Bennett’s fictionalized Elizabeth II discovers a passion for reading—an opsimath, she calls herself, delighted to find a word describing a tate-blooming learner. She neglects her official chores as she breezes through an eclectic canon including Mitford, Austen, Balzac, Pepys, Byatt, McEwan, Roth, and even the memoirs of Lauren Bacall, whose life she envies for having “had a much better bite at the carrot.” The Queen confuses those she meets by asking about their reading habits, throws her courtiers and her family into a state of high alarm, and eventually decides to take up writing and redeem her life “by analysis and reflection.”

It is a thoroughly fanciful plot, given the Queen’s deep-seated sense of duty and practical turn of mind. But as in A Question of Attribution twenty years earlier, Bennett zeroes in on the Queen’s underestimated qualities and depicts a shrewd, observant, and inquisitive character whose sly wit (“Oh do get on!” she mutters while reading Henry James at teatime) is a believable facsimile of Elizabeth II’s tart asides.

The book was a runaway bestseller in Britain and the United States, propelled by word of mouth and rave reviews. After The Queen, wrote Jeremy McCarter in The New York Times Book Review, the book “offered yet another reason to think warmly of Her Majesty, another reminder that marble has veins.” Like the film, Bennett’s book tapped into a yearning for Elizabeth II to break out of the royal cocoon, and to show some of her repressed mischief. The most touching aspect of Bennett’s depiction is his character’s discovery of egalitarian anonymity when immersed in a book: “It was shared, it was common.… Between these covers she could go unrecognized.”

The real Queen keeps her views of literature well guarded, but she does take a special interest in the annual Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, a competition for authors around the world. She reads the winning novels for pleasure intermingled with obligation. Most of them are historical fiction, and in recent years she has enjoyed The Secret River by Kate Grenville, on the early colonization of Australia; Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones, about Papua New Guinea; and The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill, on the slave trade with Canada. Each summer she invites the winner to Buckingham Palace for an audience. “It’s very informal,” said Mark Collins, director of the Commonwealth Foundation, who accompanies the authors. “It’s upstairs in her private apartments, and we’re knee-deep in corgis running around.” For twenty minutes she conducts an earnest discussion touching on the writer’s roots, the source of inspiration, and how the book developed. “She asks how the locations came to be selected, and the characters, and any reflections on the country that the author might have,” recalled Collins. “The discussion rattles along tidily.”

ELIZABETH II IS not the sort to brood about mortality, but in the early years of her ninth decade she almost seemed to be making her way down a sort of royal bucket list, checking off things she hadn’t done before, and places she hadn’t seen. In June 2008, she attended her first luncheon at Pratt’s, an exclusive men’s club in St. James’s owned by the Duke of Devonshire. At the invitation of a conservation group called the Shikar Club, she joined her husband and ten other members for drinks in front of a large fireplace, followed by a robust meal of smoked salmon, lamb cutlet, and treacle tart. The following July she watched the annual Swan Upping, a ritual dating to the twelfth century when the swans on the Thames (which belong to the sovereign) are officially counted. She even started taking a regular commuter train to and from King’s Lynn in Norfolk for her annual winter break at Sandringham. She didn’t sit with the regular passengers, however; for security reasons, she and her small party took over a first-class compartment.

For shooting, stalking, and fishing weekends at Sandringham and Balmoral she began including more guests a generation younger. “We have seen less of them,” said a woman who had been a regular guest of Elizabeth II and Philip since the 1950s. “They don’t just see the old fogies.”

The children of her longtime friends found that she responded readily when they invited her to informal dinners, where she took time to chat with their own teenage children, asking them questions and listening intently. When one of her bridesmaids, Lady Elizabeth Longman (known to her friends as “Smith”), turned eighty, Elizabeth II went to a cocktail party in her honor in a small flat. While a female protection officer waited in the car, a guest escorted the Queen up in a rickety elevator. She stayed for more than an hour and spent a full fifteen minutes talking to Smith’s grandson, Freddy Van Zevenbergen, a designer who built scale models of grand houses.

For the first time in nine years, the Queen had a winner on the final day of Royal Ascot in June 2008. Her two-year-old colt Free Agent was running behind what John Warren called “a wall” of ten other horses with only three furlongs to go in the Chesham Stakes. But Free Agent, ridden by Richard Hughes, broke through and won by two and a quarter lengths. “I’ve done it!” the Queen shouted. Seated between Warren and her husband, she jumped up and punched the air with her fist—an unusual public display captured by BBC cameras for the evening newscasts. “It was a moment of real joy,” said John Warren. Afterward, “she raced to the paddock like she was 20,” said her fifty-two-year-old bloodstock adviser. “We were struggling to keep up with her. The jockey was trying to explain what had happened but all the Queen wanted to do was touch her horse.”

Earlier in the week at Ascot, Helen Mirren was in attendance to present a trophy, and the Queen asked her cinematic alter ego to the royal box for tea. “I wouldn’t have been invited to tea if she had hated the film,” said Mirren. “I was very touched to be invited.” The Queen said, “Hello, it’s lovely to meet you,” followed by some “horsey chat.” It was only the second time Elizabeth II had met an actress who played her. Some years earlier she had encountered Prunella Scales, who portrayed the Queen in A Question of Attribution.