forgiveness. She shared Thatcher’s respect for Profumo’s dedication to good works, and that evening she was seen “in animated conversation with him,” recalled Charles Powell, Baron Powell of Bayswater, one of Thatcher’s senior advisers.
As David Bruce feared, Profumo’s conduct had seriously damaged Macmillan, who told the Queen in September 1963 that he planned to relinquish his party’s leadership before the next general election the following year. Less than a month later he was stricken with severe pain from an inflamed and enlarged prostate and was rushed into surgery on October 10 to remove what was thought to be a malignant tumor. The operation was successful and the tumor benign. Yet in a panic not unlike Eden’s, Macmillan nevertheless decided to resign immediately, and the Queen interrupted her annual summer holiday in Balmoral to return to London.
The drama that unfolded over the following week cast Elizabeth II in an unnecessarily bad light as Macmillan schemed to prevent his deputy, Rab Butler, from succeeding him. Through an extraordinary series of maneuvers, Macmillan set himself up as the ultimate arbiter by interviewing all four candidates from his sickbed at King Edward VII Hospital. He chose his sixty-year-old foreign secretary, the 14th Earl of Home, as the leader who would attract the most Conservative Party support. Macmillan buttressed his case with a poll of the cabinet showing ten ministers in Home’s favor, three for Butler, and three each for the other two candidates. However, the backing of the party rank and file was not as clear-cut.
Because of his post-operative confinement, Macmillan sent his letter of resignation to the Palace and arranged with private secretary Michael Adeane for the Queen to visit him in the hospital for their final audience. On the morning of October 18, 1963, the Palace announced that Macmillan had resigned. Shortly afterward the Queen, dressed in a peacock green coat and hat, set out for the hospital. Macmillan awaited her in his bed, which had been wheeled into the boardroom. He wore an old brown sweater over a white silk shirt, and he was tethered to a tube draining bile into a pail under the bed, with a bottle nearby in case he had an accident of incontinence.
As Elizabeth II entered the room, Macmillan was enchanted by her “firm step, and those brightly shining eyes which are her chief beauty.” The prime minister’s physician, Sir John Richardson, recorded that “there were in fact tears in her eyes.” Seated in a tall chair at his bedside, the Queen “seemed moved,” Macmillan later wrote, and said “how sorry she had been to get my letter of resignation.” From that moment, he was a former prime minister, and she had no constitutional necessity to heed his advice. In fact, in the two previous situations in which she had used her prerogative to select a leader for the Tory party, Churchill and Eden had specifically withheld any official guidance following their resignations.
Yet according to Macmillan, “the Queen asked for my advice as to what she should do,” and he obliged by reading aloud his memorandum arguing the case for Lord Home, adding that she should send for him “immediately.” Macmillan also urged her to refrain from appointing Home directly as prime minister. Instead, she should instruct him to “take his soundings” and report whether he had sufficient support from his party to form a government.
The Queen followed her former prime minister’s counsel to the letter. Home received the backing of the cabinet, including Butler, for whom refusing to serve as one of Home’s ministers would have been an act of disloyalty. The next morning, Home renounced his peerage and traveled to Buckingham Palace to kiss hands—the act of being officially received as the head of government, which requires picking up the Queen’s hand and brushing it lightly with the lips—as Sir Alec Douglas-Home, her fourth prime minister.
The selection process was criticized in the press and among politicians in both parties. Despite his oft- professed concern for constitutional propriety, Macmillan had boxed in the Queen, critics agreed, by virtually compelling her to take his advice after he had resigned. And for all his insistence on guarding her prerogatives, his actions effectively ended her role in naming the leader of the Tories. Not long afterward, the party adopted new Labour-style rules for choosing its leader through an election.
Critics blamed Macmillan and the familiar “magic circle” of aristocratic men for shaping a decision that should have been based on wider soundings. But Elizabeth II could be faulted as well for failing to organize her own independent canvassing beyond the cabinet—especially after being accused of consulting too narrowly for her selections in 1955 and 1957—and for yielding to Macmillan’s anti-Butler agenda. It was her most controversial decision to date, a curious abandonment of the astute political judgment she had developed in the twelve years of her reign.
Palace aides pointed out that Douglas-Home happened to be her personal preference as well. She reportedly regarded Butler as “too remote” and “too complex,” while Douglas-Home was another Old Etonian—also taught by the eccentric Sir Henry Marten—and a longtime family friend with whom she enjoyed country pursuits on their Scottish estates. Thin to the point of frailty, her new prime minister was a consummate gentleman with a fondness for flower arranging. David Bruce considered him “excruciatingly amusing.”
He was a familiar presence in the Queen’s official life as well, not only as a member of Macmillan’s cabinet, but also the highly dignified peer who carried the Cap of Maintenance on a stick at the Opening of Parliament. He took a progressive stance when he introduced the Life Peerages bill in the House of Lords in 1957, adding mischievously that “taking women into a parliamentary embrace seemed to be only a modest extension of the normal functions of a peer.” Further to his credit, he was an experienced hand in foreign policy with knowledge that included a year spent reading Marxist works including
Macmillan was sixty-nine when he retired, and he would lead an active life for twenty-three more years. The Queen wrote him a long and heartfelt letter while he was still recuperating, thanking him for being her “guide and supporter through the mazes of international affairs and my instructor in many vital matters relating to our constitution and to the political and social life of my people.” She offered him an earldom so he might “continue to take part in public life from the benches of the Upper House,” as well as the Order of the Garter, both of which he rather imperiously declined. More than two decades later, on his ninetieth birthday, he would finally relent, accepting the title of Earl of Stockton, conferred personally by the Queen as one of the rare hereditary peerages in the late twentieth century.
WHEN THE TRANSFER of Conservative power took place in October 1963, Elizabeth II was four months pregnant. Her nest was already two thirds empty, with Charles at Gordonstoun, and Anne off to boarding school at Benenden that September. By November the Queen had essentially retired from public appearances, although in mid-month she came to a black-tie dinner party given by Ambassador David Bruce and his second wife, Evangeline, at Winfield House, their residence in Regent’s Park. Because of her condition, the Queen asked that it be a small party, with just sixteen guests, all of whom she approved after discussions between Bruce and Michael Adeane.
“It is almost incredible how much detailed planning is involved in a dinner for the Queen,” Bruce wrote in his diary. The Polish butler, Russian chef, four footmen, and countless maids prepared “as if for a mammoth carnival,” including chasing down unfounded rumors that the Queen disliked soup and would only drink tomato juice while pregnant. The one admonition to the chef from the Palace was not to garnish his pastry with Amorini, the small Italian chocolate heart-shaped candies coated in bright colors or edible silver. When asked, the Queen said she was indifferent whether women wore long or short dresses.
It was a high-powered but lively British-American group: Mollie and Robert Cranborne (the future 6th Marquess and Marchioness of Salisbury); Conservative politician Ian Gilmour and his wife, Caroline (a daughter of the 8th Duke of Buccleuch); American journalist Walter Lippmann and his wife, Helen; Lee and Stas Radziwill; the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire; Michael Adeane; Tory cabinet minister and future prime minister Edward Heath; and Katharine Macmillan (the wife of the former prime minister’s son, Maurice). The Queen knew everyone except the Lippmanns, and she was pleased to greet the Bruces’ spaniels as well.
“All went with a swing,” Bruce recalled. “The Queen appeared to like all the dishes and wines, she was ready and gay in conversation, as was her husband.… She blends openness with dignity, has a dazzling complexion, and cordial, sympathetic, unaffected manners.” After dinner she talked first to Walter Lippmann, then moved on to each of the men, while Philip conversed with the women. It was nearly midnight when the royal couple left.
Just ten days later, on the 22nd of November, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. “The unprecedented intensity of that wave of grief mixed with something akin to disaster swept over our people,” Elizabeth II recalled. Prince Philip and Alec Douglas-Home flew to Washington for the funeral, but because of her pregnancy, the Queen’s doctors advised her against attending the memorial service at St. Paul’s Cathedral. She insisted on having her own service at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, to which she invited nearly four hundred
