accessible and folksy, engaging in activities ordinary people could relate to. Most critics applauded the film’s humanizing effect. Cecil Beaton, who had observed the Queen closely for more than two decades, thought she “came through as a great character, quite severe, very self-assured, a bit bossy, serious, frowning a bit (and very lined). Her sentences are halting. She hesitates mid-way, you think she has dried up … but she goes on doggedly. She came out on top as the nice person she is.”
There was some inevitable mockery of the family’s old-fashioned traditions and stodgy costumes. One wag called the film “Corgi and Beth,” and
Some worried about the consequences of violating the precept set out in the nineteenth century by economist and constitutional expert Walter Bagehot that a sovereign should maintain a measure of mystery: “We must not let in daylight upon magic.” Milton Shulman, the television critic for the
Neither the Queen nor the Palace hierarchy expressed second thoughts, although she never again permitted that kind of intimate entree. Princess Anne later said that the film had been a “rotten idea” that she “never liked.… The attention that had been brought on one since one was a child, you just didn’t want any more. The last thing you needed was great access.” But the reaction of the public was overwhelmingly positive.
THE GLOW OF good feeling created by the film carried over to the investiture of Prince Charles on July 1, which was televised from the grassy courtyard of ancient Caernarvon Castle in Wales. Only one previous Prince of Wales, Charles’s great-uncle, the Duke of Windsor, had been officially inducted in the role, in a ceremony at the castle in 1911. To help create a stronger bond with Wales, overcome historic resentments dating from the country’s conquest by English kings in the thirteenth century, and restrain incipient nationalistic feelings, his mother had arranged for Charles to leave Cambridge the previous spring for eight weeks at University College, Aberystwyth. There he picked up some rudimentary Welsh, and was tutored in the history of the country’s nationalism—valuable lessons, he said afterward, that helped him understand that the “language and culture” were “very unique and special to Wales” and “well worth preserving.”
The actual investiture ceremony was a twentieth-century invention evoking medieval traditions, orchestrated by the Duke of Norfolk on a contemporary stage set created by Welshman Lord Snowdon, who was a designer as well as a photographer. With TV cameras in mind, Snowdon designed a low round slate dais underneath a minimalist Plexiglas canopy supported by steel poles resembling pikestaffs. On the dais were three austere thrones of slate with scarlet cushions. Snowdon intended to project a “grand and simple” image of a modern monarchy. “I didn’t want red carpets,” Snowdon said. “I wanted him to walk across simple green grass.”
The Queen was surprisingly on edge while she prepared for the procession into the courtyard. With noticeable agitation, she wondered aloud if the text of what she had to say would be on her seat. Philip snapped that he had no idea, “that it was her show not his.” After exchanging more cross words, they moved off, their faces suitably arranged.
As she waited on the dais for the arrival of her son, Elizabeth II tucked her white handbag under one arm and held a furled umbrella in the other—an unnecessary precaution, since there was only a brief light drizzle. With four thousand invited guests looking on, Charles emerged from the Chamberlain Tower in his dark blue dress uniform of Colonel-in-Chief of the Royal Regiment of Wales, decorated with his gleaming Garter collar.
The climax of the ceremony came when he kneeled before his mother, who invested him with the insignia of his office in a solemn ritual punctuated with his periodic shy smiles. She first presented him with a sword inscribed with his motto “Ich Dien” (I serve), hanging it gently around his neck before adjusting the strap attached to its scabbard. She then crowned him with a coronet of 24-karat Welsh gold set sparingly with diamonds and emeralds over a purple velvet cap trimmed in ermine. Unlike other royal crowns, Charles’s was strikingly stylized, with a single arch topped by an engraved orb, and crosses like stickpins interspersed with plainly wrought versions of the three-feathers emblem of the Prince of Wales.
As Elizabeth II put the coronet on his head, it settled just above his eyes, and he helped her by nudging it into place with his fingertips. She slipped onto his left hand a cabochon amethyst ring, symbolizing his unity with Wales, gave him his golden rod (for temporal rule), and draped a purple silk mantle with wide ermine collar on his shoulders, smoothing it into place in a practiced maternal gesture before fastening the gold clasp. After he had paid her homage, she raised him up and they exchanged the kiss of fealty on their left cheeks, signifying her pledge to protect the prince in his duties.
“By far the most moving and meaningful moment,” he later wrote, “came when I put my hands between Mummy’s and swore to be her liege man of life and limb and to live and die against all manner of folks.” Those were the precise words his father had used during the Queen’s coronation, and to Charles they were “magnificent, medieval, appropriate.” The Queen looked suitably somber as well, although later that month, over lunch at Royal Lodge, Noel Coward told her that he had found the investiture moving. “She gaily shattered my sentimental illusions,” Coward recorded, “by saying that they were both struggling not to giggle because at the dress rehearsal the crown was too big and extinguished him like a candle-snuffer!”
An estimated worldwide television audience of 500 million had watched the heir to the throne’s official coming of age. For Charles, the investiture marked the start of his apprenticeship as king-in-waiting, the length of which he could never have imagined.
The Queen reviewing papers with her long-serving private secretary, Sir Martin Charteris, late at night aboard the royal yacht
TEN
Ring of Silence
PIETRO ANNIGONI RETURNED TO BUCKINGHAM PALACE IN THE SPRING and fall of 1969 to paint the Queen’s portrait for the second time. After an interval of fifteen years, Annigoni could detect changes that eluded those who saw the forty-three-year-old Queen every day. “Everything about her seemed smaller,” he observed, “in some ways frailer and in some ways harder. As she posed her facial expression was mercurial—smiling, thoughtful, determined, uncertain, relaxed, taut, in rapid succession.… At every sitting the Queen chatted to me in the most natural way, and her disarming frankness never failed to surprise and fascinate me.”
