American servicemen stationed in England.
Some eighteen months later, on May 14, 1965, she would preside over the dedication of a unique memorial to the fallen president: an acre of land at Runnymede, the site where King John sealed the Magna Carta in 1215, given by the British people to the United States in perpetuity. Marking the ground was a plinth with Kennedy’s birth and death dates along with an inscription from his inaugural address: “Let every Nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend or oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and success of liberty.” A committee chaired by David Ormsby Gore oversaw the fund- raising, design, and construction of the memorial, all of which the Queen followed with marked interest.
At the dedication, Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh accompanied Jackie Kennedy and her children up a woodland path to the memorial site. Four-year-old John Kennedy Jr. gave the Queen a small bow, and his seven- year-old sister, Caroline, dropped a quick curtsy. As they climbed the hill, Prince Philip tenderly held John’s hand.
During the ceremony, Macmillan spoke sentimentally of his late friend and ally, and Elizabeth II’s graceful remarks showed “generosity, sympathy and understanding,” recalled David Bruce. She touched on JFK’s many ties to Britain—his life in England during the “doom laden period” before World War II, the death of his elder brother, Joe, “on a hazardous mission” during the war, and his “dearly loved sister” Kathleen, who lay “buried in an English churchyard.” The Queen talked of Kennedy’s “wit and style,” adding that “with all our hearts, my people shared his triumphs, grieved at his reverses, and wept at his death.” Jackie did not speak, but issued a statement of thanks to the British people, saying “you share with me thoughts that lie too deep for tears.”
ON MARCH 10, 1964, the thirty-seven-year-old Queen gave birth to her fourth child, Edward Antony Richard Louis, in the Belgian Suite at Buckingham Palace. She remained out of the public eye until May, but she kept up with her office work. When her baby was barely a month old, her government boxes revealed a disquieting secret she would be compelled to keep until its unmasking fifteen years later. Sir Anthony Blunt, since 1945 the Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, the man responsible for the art collections in her palaces, was a spy for the Soviet Union. In exchange for “immensely valuable” information about Soviet collaborators, the British intelligence service gave Blunt immunity. “The Queen knew for years that this man was a spy,” said Peter Rawlinson, Baron Rawlinson of Ewell, the government’s solicitor-general, who arranged the immunity deal. “It was essential to keep him in his position at Buckingham Palace looking after the Queen’s pictures. Otherwise Russia would have realized that his cover had been blown.”
If she was unnerved by the revelation of Blunt’s treachery, she gave no sign. “I find that I can often put things out of my mind which are disagreeable,” she told one courtier. Partly from training, but also her instinctive discretion, Elizabeth II had accustomed herself to absorbing information from so many different sources— intelligence reports, cabinet papers on proposed government reforms, a conversation with a judge on problems in the courts—that she learned how to seal off sensitive information. “She has a compartmentalized brain, with lots of boxes,” said Margaret Rhodes. “She can appear frightfully jolly while a constitutional question is going on in another part of her mind.”
Less than a week after Blunt made his shocking confession, Elizabeth II was hosting one of her springtime series of “dine-and-sleep” gatherings at Windsor Castle. “She talked of all sorts of things,” David Bruce recalled, “including such political questions as Laos, Cyprus, and Zanzibar, revealing extensive briefing and reading. On lighter topics she was humorous and communicative.”
These periodic entertainments, which Queen Victoria began in the nineteenth century when the court was officially in residence at Windsor each April, bring together eight to ten prominent guests drawn from the arts, diplomacy, the clergy, business, the military, academia, the judiciary, and politics for a leisurely evening of dinner and conversation. Although formal in structure, the Windsor dinners are more relaxed than the Buckingham Palace luncheons organized for a similar purpose. “She regards Windsor as her home,” said Alec Douglas-Home, “just like anyone else’s home. It’s hard for us to realize.” In addition to the Easter season, Elizabeth spends every possible weekend at Windsor and takes pride in being its chatelaine. She inspects the guest rooms before the visitors’ arrivals and selects reading material for their enjoyment.
The pattern of the dine-and-sleeps has varied little from the days of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, who revived them after World War II. Each couple arrives between six and seven o’clock, to be greeted by an equerry and lady-in-waiting and escorted to their suite in the Lancaster, York, or King Edward III tower. The customary accommodation includes two large bedrooms and bathrooms, a ladies’ dressing room and commodious sitting room furnished with desks equipped with writing paper and pens, tables laden with mineral water, decanters of whisky, sherry, and gin, cornucopias of fruit, bowls of peppermint candies, jars of biscuits, and vases of fresh flowers.
She assigns a footman and housemaid to serve as each guest’s valet or ladies’ maid. Their job is to unpack the suitcases, fold underwear in gauzy organza bags, line up cosmetics and perfume bottles in perfect order, whisk away clothing for washing and ironing (“better than any dry cleaner in London,” said the wife of a Commonwealth diplomat), draw the bath at the guest’s requested temperature, drape a large bath towel over a nearby chair, lay out clothes, and before departure time repack everything with tissue paper. The size of the staff and level of pampering are unequaled, although museum director Roy Strong found it “unnerving to be descended upon by so many.”
The houseguests meet in one of the castle’s vast drawing rooms, where the Queen and Prince Philip, accompanied by the inevitable scuffling corgis, join them, along with a half dozen courtiers, for a round of drinks. The Queen tells stories about previous visitors, slipping into personalities and accents, and laughs about her misbehaving corgis. “It is always amusing to see when dogs fail to obey a royal command,” recalled one former courtier. Everybody is then escorted back to their rooms off the 550-foot, red-carpeted Grand Corridor curving along the east and south sides of the castle quadrangle.
Racing the clock, the guests have less than a half hour to change for dinner in the State Dining Room, which begins with drinks at 8:15 before the prompt arrival of the Queen and Prince Philip fifteen minutes later. Elizabeth II wears a long gown and glitters with large diamonds at her neck, ears, and wrists. Philip appears in a dinner jacket of his own design, a black-tie version of the “Windsor Uniform” originally created by George III for gentlemen at court: dark blue velvet, with brass buttons, scarlet collar, and cuffs.
The Queen doesn’t believe in general or even three-way conversation at meals, so everyone follows her lead. When she turns first to the left everyone follows suit, and all heads swivel suddenly when she turns to the right for the second half of the meal. She expects her dinner partners to know the protocol, although she sometimes offers practical tips. “I need to explain about the napkins,” she once told a guest. “Look over there. They’re doing it all wrong. They’ve got the starched side down. The napkin will slip off their knees. You do it like this, the unstarched side on your lap and then you tuck it under your bottom.”
Her conversation is congenial, but she never engages deeply, preferring to move from one topic to another. At the end of the meal, she has the somewhat outre habit of opening her evening bag, pulling out a compact, and reapplying her lipstick. When First Lady Laura Bush made a similar cosmetic fix during a Washington ladies’ luncheon, she cheerily commented, “The Queen told me it was all right to do it.”
Hewing to an upper-class ritual long after the advent of feminism in the 1970s, Elizabeth II and the women withdraw from the dining room after dinner, leaving the men to enjoy port and cigars at the table. “She never batted an eye,” recalled Jean Carnarvon, the widow of her longtime racing manager. “It was just expected.” Conversation in these vestigial female groupings might touch on harmless personal matters while yielding little about the Queen’s views.
The next stop is always the castle library, where the Queen has arranged to have objects of particular interest to each guest on display. “The selections are to entertain rather than inform,” said Oliver Everett, the Royal Librarian for nearly two decades. In the days preceding the dinner, the librarian sends her a note describing the proposed items and their importance. For an American official there could be correspondence from George Washington, or Mrs. Lincoln’s reply to Queen Victoria’s condolence note after her husband was assassinated, while the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum could be shown the original letter from the 8th Duke of Devonshire to Queen Victoria suggesting the museum’s name. “It gives people something to talk about,” said Jean Seaton, the widow of writer Ben Pimlott. “It is a good mechanism for the Queen, who is a fundamentally shy person.”
The culmination of the evening is the world’s most exclusive guided tour led by the Queen and duke through the priceless collections of the castle’s state rooms. “I suppose landscape is quite nice,” she said when asked her favorite style of painting. The equestrian scenes by George Stubbs give her the most pleasure, and it distresses her,
