Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

Queen in her public appearances at home and abroad.

But by the 1960s, the perception had taken hold that the Queen was losing touch with her subjects, who were beginning to think she and her family were dull, to wonder what exactly she did for a living, and more ominously, to question whether she was giving good value for government money spent on her and her family. Philip was the only family member who had seen television as an effective communications tool. Since his 1957 documentary on his Commonwealth tour, he had hosted a second program about the Galapagos Islands a decade later, and he had also been the first to sit for a television interview in 1961.

Philip found a kindred spirit in William Heseltine, a forthright Australian—the very opposite of the buttoned-up aristocrats who traditionally served the monarch—with a modern point of view. “I was quite a different kind of person,” Heseltine recalled. “I did think the strategy of keeping the private and public lives far apart had perhaps gone a little too far” and that the Queen and her family had become “rather one-dimensional figures.” His idea, shared by Philip and the others, was to show the Queen hard at work in a variety of settings, to get across the “relentlessness” of her job, and to open the curtain on her private life as a wife and mother in places never before seen by the public. The film would be broadcast just before the investiture of Prince Charles as the Prince of Wales in July 1969, introducing him as the symbol of the monarchy’s new generation as he reached his twenty-first year.

Above all, the architects of the film wanted to convey Elizabeth II’s humanity behind the lofty position of sovereign, and to exploit the wholesome image of her model family. “I think it is quite wrong that there should be a sense of remoteness or majesty,” said Philip. “If people see, whoever it happens to be, whatever head of state, as individuals, as people, I think it makes it much easier for them to accept the system or to feel part of the system.”

The Queen was reluctant at first, discomfited by the intrusiveness of the cameras. But when her longtime friend John Brabourne presented the idea, she said, “You can do it, and then we’ll see what it looks like.” Brabourne brought in Richard Cawston of the BBC to direct, and Philip supervised an advisory committee drawn from both the BBC and rival ITV, coordinating everything with Heseltine and his team. Elizabeth II acquiesced, said Gay Charteris, because “the Queen goes with what she has to do.” The film would be called, simply, Royal Family.

Shooting began on June 8, 1968, and continued for nearly a year. The Queen submitted to lights, cameras, and crews over seventy-five days in 172 locations around the world, resulting in forty-three hours of film that was eventually cut to 110 minutes. She was ill at ease initially, but Cawston managed to relax her, and she became less conscious of his presence, even when he was filming at close range. “She suddenly discovered it was something she could do,” said John Brabourne. She teasingly called the director “Cawston,” and invited him to meals so they could discuss camera angles and lighting. “Can’t we avoid a shadow here?” she would say, slipping into the filmmaker’s argot. “We can’t have a backlit ambassador.” When she asked to see the rushes, Cawston declined, saying she might feel self-conscious.

The novelty of the film was the juxtaposition of public and private, reinforcing a new image of the Queen as a working mother at a desk littered with papers in an office at once formal and cozy. For the first time, viewers could see the plain interior of the Royal Train, the country house comfort of Britannia’s drawing rooms, and the private apartments at Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace.

The filmmakers covered the professional bases: the Queen dispensing honors; making her official rounds on state visits to Chile and Brazil; discussing her Brazil speech with private secretary Michael Adeane (“Not enough thanks … It seems a bit churlish not to thank them”); greeting Harold Wilson at his weekly audience; receiving ambassadors; making stilted conversation with President Richard Nixon before a Buckingham Palace luncheon; presiding over one of her garden parties; riding sidesaddle at her birthday parade; circulating through receptions at Buckingham Palace. Charles was shown in action on water skis and a bicycle, and joking about writing a paper for his history course. Philip was filmed while piloting an airplane and a helicopter, working on his charities in his office (more sleek and modern than his wife’s), and painting a landscape. At crucial intervals the red boxes appeared— aboard the Royal Train, being lowered onto the deck of Britannia by helicopter, at Balmoral and Sandringham.

Aside from emphasizing the Queen’s dedication, the film provided the first extended look at what she was like in her off-hours: in her riding habit feeding carrots to her horses and with Anne on the gallops in Berkshire; examining a necklace of enormous rubies with Bobo MacDonald; washing dishes; driving the children in a Land Rover to visit puppies at the Sandringham kennels; orchestrating a family barbecue at Loch Muick with Philip, Charles, Anne, Andrew, Edward, and the corgis; laughing with her children at an American sitcom on television and trading stories around the table at lunch; decorating a Christmas tree with her extended family, including the Queen Mother, who reminisced about “the King.” Excluded were any scenes of stalking or shooting, for fear they would seem elitist or bloodthirsty.

A previously unseen tenderness emerged as the Queen sat on a sofa with her two young sons, pointing out photographs in a family album, and during an excursion with Edward to a shop near Balmoral. Fishing some coins out of a change purse she said to the woman at the counter, “This is all I’ve got.” As Edward waited in the front seat of her car, she handed him some candy and said with a giggle, “Disgusting! This is going to be a gooey mess!”

In one of the most discussed sequences in the film, editing was used to distort reality and compound an unfortunate impression. U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James’s Walter Annenberg presented his credentials to the Queen on April 29, 1969, in one of the most formal and time-honored of her ceremonies. “Court Dress” is white tie, tailcoat, and top hat, and the ambassador is driven to the late-morning audience at Buckingham Palace in one of the Queen’s gilded carriages with a coachman and footman in long red coats and silk hats. By that gesture, the Queen signals her personal responsibility for the diplomat, and she has been known to chastise Palace officials who don’t send out the carriage in bad weather. “She never underplays the importance of ceremony,” said a diplomat who assisted at many of the credentials presentations. “But part of the Queen’s process and style is to put the other person at ease as soon as she can after the formal bit. She does combine formality and informality in a remarkable way.”

Walter Annenberg had rehearsed his lines repeatedly, and he and his wife, Lee, had practiced their bows and curtsys. On the appointed morning, after he had perfectly executed his steps, bows, and presentation of “the letter of recall of my predecessor and my own letters of credence,” the Queen tried to lighten the mood in her usual manner by asking where he and his wife were living. “We’re in the embassy residence,” he replied, “subject, of course, to some of the discomfiture as a result of a need for, uh, elements of refurbishment and rehabilitation.” Her expression momentarily puzzled, she swiftly moved to the next step of receiving embassy staff and Lee Annenberg.

As if to emphasize the ambassador’s apparent buffoonery, the next scene in the film showed the Queen entering a Buckingham Palace party for diplomats. “He’s not here,” she murmured to her husband. “Who’s not here?” Philip asked. “The American ambassador,” she replied with an amused smile—implying she meant the hapless Annenberg, while in fact she was referring to his predecessor, David Bruce, and the reception had actually taken place the previous November.

Annenberg had reported to Richard Nixon that his credentials presentation had been “infinitely rewarding and impressive.” But when Royal Family aired on the BBC on June 21, 1969, the American ambassador’s “elements of refurbishment” remark produced howls of laughter and widespread ridicule in Britain. Newspapers challenged readers to produce even more egregious phrases; The Sunday Times called Annenberg the “flustered envoy”; and one magazine said he had the “verbal felicity of W. C. Fields.” What the press did not know was that the sixty-one-year-old ambassador, like the Queen’s own father, had suffered from a lifetime of stuttering. Through speech therapy, he had learned the somewhat paradoxical strategy of framing complex sentences with ornate words to prevent verbal stumbling. Annenberg was so mortified by the outcry that he told Secretary of State William Rogers he would resign if Nixon thought he couldn’t be effective in his job. Nixon reassured his ambassador that he should stay in place.

“When we reviewed the film before it was finished, the great refurbishment thing was rather laughable and we debated whether to include it,” Martin Charteris later admitted. “We allowed it to remain, but we should not have. As a result, I think the royal family felt a certain sense of guilt about Walter because they allowed a joke to be made about him. In fact, he was honorable and straightforward.”

For all its appearance of spontaneity, the film was in fact a tightly controlled rebranding of the royal family as