country residence. It was an opportunity, said Heath’s principal private secretary, Robert Armstong, for the Queen to meet Nixon “during his four-hour stay … without formality and without undue inroads into the time available for official discussions between the President and the Prime Minister.” Nixon was grateful for the Queen’s “signal kindness,” and the visit was a success.
For all his impatience with the pomp and ceremony that Wilson had found thrilling, Heath had been brought up a royalist, and he was eager to do what was necessary to support an institution that worked well. The Civil List inquiry into royal finances promised by Wilson took shape under his successor as a select committee with a Tory majority that met a half dozen times in 1971. Michael Adeane gave detailed testimony about the Queen’s official duties, the first comprehensive justification of her value to the government and the nation. He also revealed the concentration and care behind her seemingly uncomplicated daily rounds. “Taking a lively interest in everything, saying a kind word here and asking a question there,” he said, “always smiling and acknowledging cheers when driving in her car, sometimes for hours, had to be experienced to be properly appreciated.”
Labour critics questioned why the Queen was immune from taxation and demanded to know the size of her private fortune. William Hamilton, a strident republican member of the committee, called Princess Margaret—who had an admittedly light schedule of official engagements, including just thirty-one outside London in 1970—an “expensive kept woman.” The Palace pointed out that estimates of the Queen’s net worth as high as 100 million pounds were overblown, since most of her assets—her art collection, the Crown Jewels, the contents of the three state-owned palaces—were held in trust for the monarchy, yielded no income, and could not be sold.
The committee issued its report on December 2, and Parliament passed the Civil List Act of 1972, which gave the Queen what she wanted: a rise in the Civil List payment to ?980,000 a year for ten years, and increased disbursements for the other members of the royal family to cover their performance of public duties. (Princess Margaret’s rose from ?15,000 annually to ?35,000.) Elizabeth II’s Privy Purse, which covers personal as well as some public expenses such as staff pensions, would no longer receive a stipend from the Civil List and would be funded only by her Duchy of Lancaster income. For the first time, there would also be annual reviews. The press now had a way to raise such matters as taxation as well as support of peripheral members of the royal family in the years to come.
At the beginning of 1972, Michael Adeane decided to leave his post three years before his scheduled retirement, and Martin Charteris was named private secretary. “Martin was given his chance, and he blossomed,” said Gay Charteris. “He said, ‘The only thing I want to do is show the public what she is really like.’ I think he helped do that.” By way of reinforcement, Charteris used to say to Elizabeth II, “Your job is to spread a carpet of happiness.” Once he took the number one spot, the Queen’s speeches showed his deft touch, with dashes of humor that had previously been absent. He also got along well with William Heseltine, who became an assistant private secretary, and Ronald Allison, the new press secretary, who had worked on Fleet Street and understood the thinking of reporters.
THE QUEEN AT age forty-five was brimming with energy and blessed with a robust constitution. In November 1971 she somewhat improbably caught chicken pox—not even, she said, from one of her own children. She called it a “ridiculous disease” and submitted to confinement during her contagion. Once she was free of infection but still “covered in spots,” she resumed her duties inside the Palace, including receiving the prime minister at the Tuesday audience. After Heath sent her a rather stiff note “to commiserate with you” about the illness, she replied in a lighthearted tone thanking him for his kindness, and expressing her frustration that she couldn’t yet go out into crowds for fear she could be reinfected “from
It was a rare moment of ill health for the Queen. She was always a great believer in the virtues of fresh air and exercise, including her regular riding and daily walking. Wearing gloves on her public rounds and avoiding people with coughs and sniffles was also part of her routine. During her thirties and forties she nevertheless suffered from occasional colds, laryngitis, and bouts of sinusitis, which seldom prompted complaints or slowed her down. “She has a theory that you carry on working and your cold gets better,” said a cousin of the Queen. One exception was after Charles’s investiture, when a severe cold forced her to cancel engagements for four days.
Her ear, nose, and throat specialist for many years, Sir Cecil Hogg, used to make house calls at the various royal residences. After his first visit to Buckingham Palace, he reported “how unnerving it was to get under the bedclothes with the Queen in her nightie to test her chest and listen to bubbles inside,” said Min Hogg, his daughter. “He said she was quite good at putting him at ease. When he was under the bedclothes she would say, ‘I’m as nervous as you are.’ ”
While Elizabeth II has a full complement of doctors, including specialists, she also put great faith in homeopathic remedies long before such nostrums were commonplace in the culture. Her belief, shared with her mother, is that they “can do no harm and may well do you good,” explained Lady Angela Oswald, a Norfolk neighbor and friend. Homeopathy—taking diluted substances that would induce symptoms of illness if used in larger doses —was embraced by Queen Victoria, and in 1923 Sir John Weir, a Scottish doctor, began administering such treatments to members of the royal family. On Weir’s retirement in 1968, the Queen appointed her first female court physician, Dr. Margery Blackie, another homeopathic expert. Among Blackie’s more exotic treatments was Malvern water with a trace of arsenic for sinus infections.
The homeopaths would come “for whatever was wrong with them,” said Min Hogg. “The real physicians and surgeons would put their eyes to heaven.” Still, Elizabeth II has always respected the professionalism of her medical specialists. When Sir Cecil turned seventy in 1971 and had to retire—a mandatory rule imposed by the Queen’s medical advisers—she told him, “I am sorry, because you have such a steady hand.”
IN THE THIRD decade of the Queen’s reign, she stepped up the pace of her foreign travels—fifteen Commonwealth trips, including six lengthy tours of Pacific countries, designed to reinforce their standing with Britain, along with state visits to seventeen non-Commonwealth countries. One of the most significant of these was a goodwill trip to France in May 1972 that set the stage for Parliament’s ratification of a treaty allowing Britain to join the Common Market, which Heath had negotiated after intensively wooing a skeptical Georges Pompidou.
The principal apprehension before the trip was the precarious health of the Queen’s uncle, the seventy- seven-year-old Duke of Windsor, who was suffering from terminal throat cancer. After excluding him from her wedding and her coronation, the Queen had extended an olive branch seven years earlier when the duke came to London for eye surgery. She cheered him considerably by visiting him twice during his convalescence, and, for the first time since the Windsors went into exile, she met with the duchess. Two years later the duke and duchess joined the rest of the family to unveil a plaque in honor of his mother, although the couple were not invited to the Queen’s luncheon afterward, just as he had been excluded from the family dinner following Queen Mary’s funeral. But in 1968 the Queen complied graciously when the duke asked for permission to be buried with the duchess in the royal family’s cemetery at Frogmore in Windsor Home Park and pay a modest allowance for his wife if she were to survive him.
When doctors diagnosed his cancer in November 1971 and unsuccessfully treated him with radiation, the Queen alerted the Foreign Office that she wished to see him during her five-day state visit. In a confidential memo, British ambassador to France Sir Christopher Soames starkly laid out the high-stakes connection between the duke’s health and Anglo-French relations. “If the Duke of Windsor were to die on 12, 13 or 14 May or on the morning of 15 May before the Queen leaves for Paris, the visit would have to be cancelled,” Soames wrote. “I must emphasize that Pompidou clearly attaches the greatest importance to at least this part of the visit taking place, and I fear that a total cancellation though rationally understood would be taken amiss and would rankle him.”
The duke survived, and after touring Provence and attending the races at Longchamp on the afternoon of May 18, the Queen, Philip, and Prince Charles, along with Martin Charteris and Fortune Grafton, arrived at the Windsors’ home in Neuilly-sur-Seine. The duchess nervously served them tea in the drawing room before taking Elizabeth II upstairs to her uncle David’s sitting room. The old duke did his courtly best, rising from his wheelchair with great difficulty to bow to his niece and kiss her on both cheeks, despite being attached to an intravenous tube. He had shrunk to eighty-five pounds, yet, always the fashion plate, wore a smart blue blazer. They talked for about fifteen minutes, and as the Queen left, the duke’s physician, Jean Thin, saw tears in her eyes.
Accompanied by an entourage of thirty-six, the Queen followed a full program in France, traveling in an open car with Pompidou, and in the evenings appearing at the banquets at Versailles and the British embassy in one dazzling tiara after another. “We may drive on different sides of the road, but we are going the same way,” Elizabeth II declared at her banquet for the French president, with a nod toward an era of closer cooperation between Britain and Western Europe.
She left the country with a spectacular flourish, driving to Rouen at the mouth of the Seine to sail off on
