also plain black shoes with low socks, a buttoned-up cardigan with another sweater layered on top, and her ubiquitous strand of pearls. When she has downtime, she reads for pleasure, particularly historical novels—not, to anyone’s knowledge, the seven volumes of Proust, “engrossed in the sufferings of Swann … while in the wet butts on the hills the guns cracked out their empty tattoo,” as imagined by Alan Bennett in
Prince Charles paying homage to his mother after his investiture as Prince of Wales, July 1969.
NINE
Daylight on the Magic
IN THE 1960S, THE QUEEN BECAME A MORE RELAXED AND CONSISTENTLY engaged mother with her second set of children. “Goodness what fun it is to have a baby in the house again!” she said after Edward’s birth in 1964. Mary Wilson recalled that on Tuesday evenings, as the prime minister’s audience was drawing to a close, her husband “was very impressed by the fact that she always wanted to be there for the children’s baths.”
Elizabeth II felt comfortable spending more time in the nursery in part because she got along so well with Mabel Anderson. The principal nanny for Charles and Anne, Helen Lightbody, had been an autocrat nearly fifteen years older than the Queen, fierce in upholding her authority over the children. Lightbody had favored Charles over Anne, who bore the brunt of her reprimands. Displeased by her harsh treatment of his spirited daughter, Prince Philip had arranged for Lightbody’s departure.
Mabel Anderson was a year younger than the Queen, and she had an affectionate and flexible nature as well as a firm sense of right and wrong. The Queen was not intimidated by Anderson as she had been by Lightbody, and the two women worked together with the younger children. When Anderson took time off, the Queen felt relaxed enough to stay in the nursery with Andrew and Edward, putting on an apron for their baths and lulling them to sleep. Some critics have questioned whether she indulged Andrew and Edward too much, making up for not having spent more time with her older children.
Although still not inclined toward hugging and kissing, she showed more of her playful streak with Andrew and Edward. They knew Buckingham Palace was an office where the priorities were, in Andrew’s words, “work and responsibilities and duties.” Still, the passage outside the nursery echoed with the thuds of tennis balls and footballs barely missing the glass cabinets. When Sir Cecil Hogg, the family’s ear, nose, and throat doctor for more than a dozen years, was paying a house call at the Palace, “he could hear the younger children rampaging in another room,” recalled his daughter Min Hogg. “One of the children rushed into her bedroom and the Queen laughed and said to him, ‘You and your monsters!’ ”
At Windsor Castle, which the boys considered their real home, they would race their bicycles and play “dodge-ems” with pedal cars along the gilded Grand Corridor, with its twenty-two Canalettos and forty-one busts on scagliola pedestals, or outside on the gravel paths. If the boys fell down, the Queen would “pick us up and say, ‘Don’t be so silly. There’s nothing wrong with you. Go and wash off,’ just like any parent,” Andrew recalled. At teatime, they would sit with their parents to watch the BBC’s
Charles and Anne were away at school much of the time during the 1960s. Anne’s experience at her prestigious boarding school in Kent, Benenden, was much happier than her older brother’s. She had her father’s thick skin and lacerating wit to protect her from mean girls—whom she called a “caustic lot.” Her headmistress noted Anne’s ability to “exert her authority in a natural manner without being aggressive.” Like Prince Philip she was “extremely quick to grasp things” as well as impatient with those who could not. At five foot six, she was taller than her mother, with a trim and alluring figure. She had the Queen’s porcelain complexion, but stronger features including a pendulous lower lip that gave her a sulky demeanor. As a teenager she wore her hair long, which softened her appearance.
Despite her sharp intelligence, Anne had scant interest in academics, and her examination results weren’t strong enough for admission to a university. She enjoyed pushing the envelope physically, another trait inherited from her father, who taught her to sail in the rough waters off the Scottish coast and competed with her in the Cowes regatta. Anne wrote that sailing gave her “an utterly detached sensation that I have only otherwise experienced on a galloping horse … testing your skill against Nature, your ideals and the person you would like to be.” Having ridden since the age of two when she first sat on a white pony named Fum, horses became Anne’s passion. After graduating from Benenden in 1968 at age eighteen, she focused on competing in the arduous equestrian sport of three-day eventing.
When Charles was approaching his final year at Gordonstoun, his parents convened a meeting over dinner in December 1965 to map out the appropriate future for the heir to the throne, who was not included in the discussion. Three previous kings—Edward VII, Edward VIII, and George VI—had taken courses at Oxford and Cambridge but had never earned degrees. Since neither Philip nor Elizabeth II had university experience, they relied on the counsel of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey; Prime Minister Harold Wilson; Dickie Mountbatten, then chief of the Defence Staff; Robin Woods, the dean of Windsor; and Sir Charles Wilson, principal and vice- chairman of Glasgow University and chairman of the Committee of Vice-Chancellors.
For several hours, they discussed various alternatives as the Queen listened. Harold Wilson advocated Oxford, but Dickie preferred Trinity College at Cambridge and the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, followed by the Royal Navy, a plan the family eventually adopted a year later. Charles was pleased to be attending Cambridge, if only because it was so near the shooting at Sandringham, with its “creme de la creme of wild birds.” When he enrolled in the autumn of 1967, he was the first royal student to live in rooms at the college. Former conservative politician Rab Butler, then the master of Trinity, was his mentor.
As a general principle, the Queen sought to expose Charles and Anne to challenging situations and preferred to talk to them “on level grown-up terms,” one writer observed in 1968. “I remember the patience Prince Charles showed when he was around all those adults,” said Mary Wilson. At one Buckingham Palace luncheon in honor of a delegation from Nigeria, Cynthia Gladwyn found him “charming … with his desire to please, his tentative interest in everybody, his wild-rose coloring … his sensitivity contrasting with his father’s lack of it.” Within the requirements of their royal existence, Elizabeth II encouraged her older children to work their way through difficulties, learning to
