think for themselves—an approach some intimates criticized as too lax.
“Right from the beginning, they were given a tremendously free rein,” a lady-in-waiting told journalist Graham Turner, who wrote a damning account of the Queen’s mothering skills. “Because of that early independence, it became more like a club than a family,” the lady-in-waiting continued. “Charles and Anne, in particular, would also have thought, ‘Don’t let’s bother Mummy, she’s got enough on her plate already.’ And she wouldn’t have expected anything else.… The Queen and Prince Philip brought up the children very toughly.”
Princess Anne countered that “it just beggars belief” to suggest that her mother was aloof and uncaring. “We as children may have not been too demanding, in the sense that we understood what the limitations were in time and the responsibilities placed on her as monarch in the things she had to do and the travels she had to make,” said Anne, “but I don’t believe that any of us, for a second, thought she didn’t care for us in exactly the same way as any mother did.… We’ve all been allowed to find our own way and we were always encouraged to discuss problems, to talk them through. People have to make their own mistakes and I think she’s always accepted that.”
Of all the Queen’s children, Anne was the most secure and self-sufficient. The mother-daughter relationship ran smoothly, largely because they shared such a strong bond through horses. And since Anne was cut from Prince Philip’s cloth—feisty, confident, and straightforward—she could deal with his tough love.
Charles, however, struggled with his father’s demands and expectations. He had shown his mettle in taking on physical challenges, notably during two terms in the Australian outback at the Timbertop school. On returning to Gordonstoun he achieved the same “Guardian” leadership position his father had held. He even mimicked some of his father’s mannerisms—walking with one arm behind his back, making light jokes to put others at ease, tugging at his jacket sleeve, clasping his hands, or jabbing his right forefinger for emphasis.
But Philip continued to offer more criticism than praise to his son, deepening Charles’s insecurity. Philip couldn’t reconcile their “great difference,” as he once put it. “He’s a romantic, and I’m a pragmatist.” Although Charles “was too proud to admit it,” wrote Jonathan Dimbleby, “the Prince still craved the affection and appreciation that his father—and his mother—seemed unable or unwilling to proffer.… In self protection, he retreated more and more into formality with his parents.” When it came to guidance about Charles’s future, father and son minimized conflict by communicating through crisply composed letters.
It was at Sandringham and Balmoral that the children found common ground with their parents. To the Queen, Sandringham represents “an escape place, but it is also a commercially viable bit of England. I like farming … I like animals. I wouldn’t be happy if I just had arable farming.” The Queen and Prince Philip deeply imprinted their four children with knowledge of flora and fauna, and they all came to appreciate, as Anne wrote, the “pure luxury” of hours on horseback across the “miles of stubble fields around Sandringham,” as well as “the autumn colours of the rowans and silver birches, the majesties of the old Scots pines” of Deeside. Charles was so inspired that at age twenty he wrote a book for his younger brothers about the mythical “Old Man of Lochnagar” who lived in a cave on the mountain above Balmoral, tried to travel to London but returned to the solitude of his “special” home.
Philip taught all four children to shoot, as well as to cast into the pools of the River Dee and catch salmon with a well-tied fly. Anne stalked with her mother, and was often the only other woman on the hills tracking deer. Parents and children were bound by an appreciation of country traditions and rituals, including being smeared with blood on their cheeks after killing their first stag.
The family frequently took the Royal Train to the Highlands, and occasionally began their holiday with a cruise on
The royal party strolled through the walled gardens before sitting down in the dining room at Mey for a luncheon of
THE ROYAL FAMILY acquired an unusual addition in the spring of 1967 when Philip’s mother came to live at Buckingham Palace at the Queen’s invitation. Impoverished and frail, eighty-two-year-old Princess Alice had been living in Athens, where she had finally been forced to close her nursing sisterhood due to financial problems. Although she was not a real nun, she continued to wear her gray habit as a practical matter. “She did not have to worry about clothes or getting her hair done,” Philip explained to Hugo Vickers, his mother’s biographer.
Unlike the Queen Mother, who was an integral part of nearly every important gathering, Alice had always been a family satellite, orbiting in and out on visits to London, Windsor, Sandringham, and Balmoral. She disconcertingly referred to Philip by his nursery name, “Bubby-kins,” and all the grandchildren called her “Yaya,” the Greek name for grandmother. They were both fascinated and terrified by her eccentricities and her deep voice. A cigarette always in hand, she announced her rather spectral presence with a plume of smoke and hacking cough.
Alice had her son’s direct manner, which her deafness made even more formidable. “Oh, I thought you were saying something interesting,” she said to the Queen’s assistant private secretary Edward Ford after he had repeated an admittedly banal question about the circus several times during dinner. Anne acknowledged that Alice was not a “cuddly granny,” and Charles admitted being intimidated at first. But they were soon enraptured by her childhood tales of Queen Victoria, and her intriguing theories, such as the need to “compartmentalize” the brain.
When she moved into her suite—two rooms on the first floor just to the right of the balcony in the front of Buckingham Palace—Andrew and Edward often came to play halma, a form of Chinese checkers. The Queen was also a frequent visitor, and communicated well with her mother-in-law, even joining the elderly princess to watch the Changing of the Guard outside her window. Philip, while devoted to his mother, had a prickly relationship with her—“not arguments, but let’s say slight differences of agreement,” Anne explained to Hugo Vickers. “My father would then go off down the corridor muttering, and she would be in her room muttering too.”
Alice suffered from chronic bronchitis, and after her eighty-fourth birthday in February 1969 her health went into a steep decline. She died in her sleep on December 5, and she was buried at Windsor, where she had been born. Her worldly goods were even more meager than those of her late husband—just three dressing gowns that were immediately distributed to her nurses.
ALICE HAD REMAINED out of the public eye during her final years at the Palace, and she didn’t make even a cameo appearance in the most consequential media project ever to involve the royal family, a unique documentary film offering a fly-on-the-wall view of them at work and at play. It was the collective brainchild of Prince Philip; John Brabourne, who was a successful filmmaker; Dickie Mountbatten; and the Queen’s new press secretary, William Heseltine, who took over in 1968 after the retirement of Commander Sir Richard Colville, the man in charge of dealing with the press since King George VI appointed him in 1947. To recognize his long service, the Queen had knighted Colville in 1965.
For more than two decades, his mandate had been unabashedly protective. “We are not publicity agents for the royal family,” he said in 1949. “We are here to tell the press how far they cannot go.” His main job was to spoon-feed anodyne royal tidbits to the two court correspondents for the Press Association, the principal British news agency, who had their own office in Buckingham Palace, and to orchestrate silent newsreel footage of the
