guests in conversation, or arranging for introductions.
The ladies understand—as do the equerries who perform the same duties—that even if Elizabeth II seems to be ignoring them, she always knows where they are. When she directly stares at them, she needs something done. They also know from her body language when she is ready to move along and one of them needs to step in to pick up the conversational thread. Sometimes she may shift her handbag or twirl her ring. The cues are subtle—the result of learning to read her over the years rather than any specific instructions she has given. “There are no set plays,” said one former senior aide. “It is just intuition, like a wife knowing from long experience when her husband is ready to leave a drinks party.”
The ladies-in-waiting have finely tuned antennae for what they call the “Awkward Squad,” those who need to be calmed before meeting the monarch. On receiving lines, they stand ready to hold bouquets and unanticipated gifts pressed into the Queen’s hands. “She will say, ‘Can you cope? If you can’t, get one of the policemen to help you,’ ” said one of her veteran attendants. “She will be given an enormous basket filled with flowers, and she will turn and say, ‘What
Most of the time they do their drill perfectly, but when they miss their mark, they can get what Elizabeth, the Countess of Leicester, for twenty years a Lady of the Bedchamber, called “a glare.” Once when Lady Susan Hussey, a Woman of the Bedchamber, began arguing with historian Paul Johnson in a “fierce whisper,” the Queen, who was standing nearby, gave them a “comprehensive monarchical glance” and “said sharply, ‘stop bickering, you two!’ ”
Riding in the car with the Queen, her ladies-in-waiting generally let her take the conversational lead. “It would be ghastly for her to have a talkative lady-in-waiting,” said Esme, the Dowager Countess of Cromer, who was appointed in 1967. “She would have to be thinking about what to do, whom to meet, giving speeches. It would drive her mad to have a wretched woman talking away, so I would keep my mouth shut.”
The ladies-in-waiting often spend long hours on their feet, keeping up with their indefatigable boss, and since they have plenty of money, they can afford to work virtually as volunteers, with token compensation and small allowances for expenses. They can be rivalrous over choice assignments, but they tend to keep their competition among themselves. The point of their position is the honor of serving the monarch, and admission into an exclusive club where it is “easy to relax into luxury,” wrote Frances Campbell-Preston, a lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother.
While staying in one of the royal residences, they can choose from a pool of lady’s maids to take care of their daily needs, and while on duty at Buckingham Palace, the Queen’s attendants gather in their own sitting room on the second floor, opposite the nursery. Most days they have lunch in the household dining room with the private secretaries, equerries, and other senior officials. In the late afternoon they congregate for tea and drinks in the Equerry’s Room. “We never talked about the Queen and Prince Philip,” recalled Esme Cromer. “Never any complaining, or making observations. We were all very discreet, always. There was no telling stories, ever.”
As with her top advisers, the Queen has always called her ladies-in-waiting and equerries by their Christian names. The staff (never servants, a word she dislikes) such as footmen, maids, and housekeepers go by their surnames, except for the Queen’s closest personal aides, her dresser and her page. Two decades into the Queen’s reign, dresser Bobo MacDonald was sui generis in the Palace hierarchy—a mother figure who had been caring for her boss’s most private needs since she was a baby, generally acknowledged to be the sovereign’s eyes and ears. In Buckingham Palace, the small, bespectacled Scotswoman lived in an apartment above the Queen’s, where she had her meals served by liveried footmen instead of eating with the other staff in the dining room. She styled her wavy hair similarly to Elizabeth II and wore a triple strand of pearls as well as silk dresses tailored by royal couturier Norman Hartnell.
Nobody outside the family could match Bobo’s knowledge of the Queen or the unbroken link to her childhood. They had shared a bedroom until Princess Elizabeth was a teenager, including the war years in Windsor Castle. Bobo had been there for the Queen’s honeymoon, the King’s death, the unfettered idyll in Malta, the months when Philip was traveling, the births of four children, the holidays, the foreign trips. “Bobo could say anything to the Queen, like ‘You look awful in that dress,’ or ‘You can’t wear green,’ ” said Margaret Rhodes. “She was a confidante, very much so.”
Elizabeth II’s principal clothing designers, Norman Hartnell and Hardy Amies, understood that Bobo not only organized the Tuesday afternoon fittings, but that her conservative taste weighed heavily in her employer’s selections. To a certain extent, the Queen viewed her wardrobe as a military officer regards his various uniforms, clothes to be worn as the occasion required. But as Crawfie had observed when Elizabeth II was a princess, she took pleasure in crafting her look. “The sketches were put all over the floor and the rolls of fabric,” recalled Valerie Rouse, a vendeuse for Hardy Amies. “She used to crawl around the floor saying, ‘Well, I’ll have this with that.’ She absolutely knew she didn’t want too many shoulder pads. She didn’t want it too short. She did a lot of sitting down and waving.”
Bobo inclined toward the practical and comfortable, especially in the winter when she fussed about her “little lady” being warm enough. She also considered accessories her bailiwick, particularly the Queen’s boxy handbags that gave the couturiers fits. Bobo developed such a dislike for Amies that when the Queen knighted him she said, “Bobo will give me hell for this.”
Monarch and faithful servant had a tight partnership, but few knew what passed between them, which made Bobo a powerful presence. “She knew everything about the Queen,” said a long-serving footman. “They were stuck with each other. Miss MacDonald was not going to hand anything over to others.” Nearly everybody—from the Lord Chamberlain to the housemaids—was intimidated by Bobo’s strong personality, although she was “quite friendly when thawed,” wrote valet John Dean, and had a good sense of humor. When the Queen visited a stud farm in Normandy owned by the Duc d’Audiffret-Pasquier in 1967 to see the stallions that had been covering her mares for several years, Bobo wandered away from the chateau for a walk in the woods and got lost, only to be arrested by the French secret service—a cause for much merriment among the royal party.
THE QUEEN’S SMALL group of good friends has been known for the same rigorous discretion as her most faithful retainers. She has never particularly encouraged new friendships, but she has been open-minded enough to enlarge the circle from time to time. To be a friend of the Queen is an inherently lopsided experience. Those admitted to the inner sanctum understand the rules and have an instinctive sense of the invisible barriers. The women curtsy when they meet her, she kisses them on the cheek, and they feel free to return the affectionate gesture. They know how to make her relax and laugh, and she lets down her guard enough to share her piquant views of people and events, if not her innermost feelings.
They can seek her advice, which Patricia Brabourne described as “sound, very human, very wise.” But they don’t pick up the phone and unburden themselves. Above all, they are respectful. Even David Airlie (the 13th Earl), who first met her as a five-year-old, would never say “Oh, come off it.” One ironclad principle is to avoid repeating her precise words—what has been called a “ring of silence.” “Those who see the private side don’t say anything specific for fear of violating her trust,” said the son of one of her lifelong friends. Yet those who know her best have a knack for speaking perceptively about her character and personality without betraying confidences.
“She is not someone who is enormously intimate,” said a friend of nearly six decades. “She is a wonderful friend, hugely amusing and incredible. She is straightforward and down-to-earth, and she is thoughtful. If one of one’s children is terribly ill, she will know, and say ‘How is so and so.’ But you can’t go too close. There is an aura. You wouldn’t treat her like your best friend sitting on a sofa. It is not because she is doing it on purpose. It is just part of her. You cannot encroach on her personal life. You just don’t go there.”
Superficially, the Queen’s circle might easily be dismissed as tweedy toffs, but in fact the men are capable and accomplished, the women bright and lively, all made of strong stuff and utterly reliable. “One of her greatest strengths is she is not associated with the old landed peerage,” said Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, the 7th Marquess of Salisbury, very much of that group, which also includes the grand dukes of Marlborough, Devonshire, and Beaufort. “She doesn’t have a clique. She has old friends, and the people she is related to. She is family minded.”
For friendship she has relied on her extended network of cousins on the Bowes Lyon side, mainly Mary Colman, Jean Elphinstone Wills and her sister Margaret Rhodes, Mountbatten cousins Patricia Brabourne and Pamela Hicks, as well as Henry “Porchey” Carnarvon, Hugh Grafton, and Rupert Nevill, who all knew her from the wartime days in Windsor Castle, longtime family friends in the sporting set such as the Earls of Airlie and Westmorland, and Sir Eric and Prudence Penn, who were linked to the Queen in several different ways. Prudence had been a friend from teenage years, and her husband served more than twenty years at the Palace organizing ceremonial events. His uncle and de facto guardian, Arthur Penn, had been one of the Queen Mother’s best friends
