Later in the year during her rescheduled state visit to Ghana, Elizabeth II proved her worth to the American president in an unanticipated way. Following the African country’s independence from Britain in 1957, newly elected president Kwame Nkrumah had appeared to be an enlightened leader, hospitable to Western political and business interests and committed to multiracialism. He had an Egyptian wife who was a Coptic Christian, and several of his top aides were English, including an army captain as his secretary and a woman who served as his aide and amanuensis.
But in the two years since the Queen’s visit was postponed, Nkrumah had hardened into a dictator presiding over what Winston Churchill characterized as a “corrupt and tyrannical regime,” imprisoning hundreds of members of the opposition without trial, expelling British officers and advisers, and railing against Britain in speeches. Just as ominously, after a visit to Moscow in September 1961, Nkrumah had edged toward an alliance with the Soviet Union and a possible departure from the Commonwealth.
Despite the specter of violence triggered by demonstrations, labor unrest, and death threats against Nkrumah, Macmillan advised the Queen to proceed with her travel plans for mid-November. At the same time, he urged Kennedy to help thwart Soviet designs on Ghana by offering the country millions of dollars for the Volta Dam project, a request the American president held in abeyance. Members of Parliament and some elements in the press pushed for the Queen to cancel the trip. Churchill wrote to Macmillan of the “widespread uneasiness both over the physical safety of the Queen and perhaps more, because the visit would seem to endorse a regime … which is thoroughly authoritarian.” Macmillan replied that day, saying that “her wish is to go. This is natural with so courageous a personality.”
The Queen was profoundly irritated by the pressure from the “fainthearts in Parliament and the press.… How silly I should look if I was scared to visit Ghana and then Khrushchev went and had a good reception.” Even after bombs exploded in Accra five days before her trip was to begin, she refused to waver.
She melted Nkrumah, with whom she was photographed dancing at a state ball, and she charmed the Ghanaian press, who called her “the greatest Socialist monarch in the world.” The people of Ghana “fell for her— went out of their minds for her,” said the BBC’s Audrey Russell. “In that open car … she didn’t bat an eyelid— Nkrumah next to her. You just saw the Queen very calm, very poised—not smiling too much—just right.” Afterward Elizabeth II sized up Nkrumah with uncanny precision in a letter to her friend Henry Porchester, expressing surprise at “how muddled his views on the world seemed to be, and how naive and vainglorious were his ambitions for himself and his country,” along with her dismay at his “short term perspective” and inability to “look beyond his own lifetime.”
On her return to London in late November, Macmillan called Kennedy and said, “I have risked my Queen. You must risk your money!” JFK responded that he would meet Elizabeth II’s “brave contribution” with his own, and less than two weeks later he announced the U.S. financing of the Volta Dam. With that, the fear of Ghana’s departure from the Commonwealth abated.
The Queen did not see Jack Kennedy again, although Jackie and Lee came through London in March 1962 on the way home from India and Pakistan. This time Elizabeth II gave the American sisters a Buckingham Palace luncheon with the Macmillans, Andrew Devonshire (the 11th Duke), Michael Adeane, Master of the Household Patrick Plunket, and other guests. Unlike the previous visit, the first lady and the Queen seemed to click. “It was a great pleasure to meet Mrs. Kennedy again,” Elizabeth II wrote to JFK. “I hope her Pakistan horse [a bay gelding named Sardar given her by President Mohammad Ayub Khan] will be a success—please tell her that mine became very excited by jumping with the children’s ponies in the holidays, so I hope hers will be calmer!”
THAT SPRING IT was time for Prince Charles to take the next step in his education after his final year at Cheam. In April he was dispatched at age fifteen to Gordonstoun. If anything, Philip had become even more convinced that the rigors of his alma mater were vital to strengthening his timid and introspective son and making him more resilient. He felt it was important that a boy should be shown “the stuff he is made of, to find himself, or become even dimly aware of his own possibilities.” After a young man had overcome physical challenges, Philip could see “a light in his eye, and a look about him that distinguishes him from his fellows.” The reason such young men looked different, he said, was their discovery that “they can take it,” that “they were only frightened of themselves to begin with and now they know they have no cause to be frightened of themselves or of anything else either.”
Yet as with Cheam, Philip transmuted his own successful experience at Gordonstoun into wishful thinking about his son, and neither Elizabeth II nor her mother could dissuade him. The Queen Mother had advocated Eton as an easier fit, a place where Charles could find familiar companionship with the sons of aristocrats. But Philip argued against its proximity to Windsor Castle and London, where tabloid journalists were lurking. The modernist in Philip also saw advantages in exposing his son to a more egalitarian and diverse environment than Eton, with its deeply rooted upper-class traditions.
Charles suffered what he later called his “prison sentence” of five years in northeastern Scotland under conditions even worse than at Cheam. More than the short pants in frigid weather, the early morning runs, the cold showers, and open windows in all seasons, Charles found the constant bullying intolerable. He wrote to his parents of the “hell … especially at night,” when his dorm mates would throw slippers and pillows at him or “rush across the room and hit me as hard as they can.” He pleaded to come home, but his father responded that Charles should find strength in the adversity.
The only respite for Charles came from visits to Balmoral, and particularly Birkhall, where he could be pampered by his grandmother and share her interest in art and music. But even then, “an awful cloud came down three or four days before he had to return,” recalled David Ogilvy, the 13th Earl of Airlie, a family friend. “He hated returning to Gordonstoun.”
Following the royal family’s annual Balmoral holiday that year, the world stood still for thirteen days in October when the United States confronted the Soviet Union over the installation of nuclear missiles in Cuba and narrowly averted a nuclear war. The Queen was kept informed throughout the crisis by Macmillan, who was in frequent contact with Kennedy. The missile crisis further solidified British-American ties. Kennedy had relied on David Ormsby Gore’s counsel for some crucial tactical decisions, most importantly the size of the blockade perimeter, and Macmillan had served as a useful sounding board.
By the Queen’s seventh and final year with Macmillan as her prime minister, they had settled into an amiable relationship of mutual understanding and respect. He had his own sense of grandeur, yet he treated her with a courtly deference in the spirit of Churchill. “She loves her duty and means to be Queen and not a puppet,” he wrote. He had particularly earned her admiration with his conscientious efforts to stabilize the Commonwealth. She in turn knew how to offer him levity, strength, compassion, or admiration as his mood required, and in 1963 she would deploy her entire range of reactions.
In January she commiserated over his disappointment when de Gaulle condescendingly vetoed British membership in the Common Market. Shortly afterward she and Philip left on
Profumo initially denied his sexual intimacy with Keeler both to Macmillan and to the House of Commons, but in June he was forced to resign in disgrace after admitting he had lied. Macmillan was compelled to tell Parliament that he had been “grossly deceived”—which David Bruce called “pitiable and extremely damaging.” Bruce feared that confidence in Macmillan had been “greatly undermined.”
To the Queen, the prime minister wrote a letter expressing his “deep regret at the development of recent affairs” and offering his apology for “the undoubted injury done by the terrible behavior of one of Your Majesty’s Secretaries of State,” adding that he had “of course no idea of the strange underworld” of Profumo and his coterie. Elizabeth II replied with what Alistair Horne described as a “charmingly consoling letter … sympathizing with her prime minister over the horrible time he had been experiencing.”
Profumo withdrew from the public stage and devoted the rest of his life to working quietly on behalf of the poor and homeless. Years later he was discreetly befriended by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who so admired his dignified and responsible service that for her seventieth birthday party at Claridge’s in 1995 she seated him next to Elizabeth II. The Palace approved his place of honor, reflecting the Queen’s tolerance and capacity for
