The trip was a diplomatic success, and Pompidou was well pleased. Britain’s
On May 28, just ten days after the Queen’s visit, the Duke of Windsor died. Back in England, Elizabeth II directed Patrick Plunket to arrange a dignified but muted funeral on Monday, June 5. Her one conundrum was how to handle Trooping the Colour two days earlier. Rather than cancel her annual birthday parade, she had bagpipers and drummers of the Scots Guards play a lament in memory of the former King, a compromise devised by Charteris. The duke’s body lay in state for two days at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, where the half hour service took place, followed by his burial at Frogmore. Four senior clergymen—the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Archbishop of York, the Moderator of the Church of Scotland, and the Dean of Windsor—officiated, and all the adult members of the royal family attended except the duke’s only surviving sibling, the Duke of Gloucester, who was ailing.
The seventy-five-year-old duchess stayed at Buckingham Palace, and during dinner the first night with the Queen and Prince Charles she oddly “prattled away,” seemingly oblivious to her husband’s death. The following evening she visited St. George’s Chapel, where she repeated, “He gave up so much for so little,” and pointed at herself “with a strange grin,” Charles recalled. She was heavily sedated on the day of the funeral, and conspicuously disoriented as she sat in the choir with the Queen, who “showed a motherly and nanny-like tenderness and kept putting her hand on the Duchess’s arm and glove,” Clarissa Eden reported.
Elizabeth II’s Christmas broadcast that year took note of the silver wedding anniversary she and Philip had celebrated the previous month, connecting the tolerance and understanding necessary for a successful marriage to the need for such values in achieving harmony among nations. Her main message was meant to reassure the countries of the Commonwealth on the eve of Britain’s official entry into the European Economic Community, as the Common Market was now called, in January 1973. “The new links with Europe will not replace those with the Commonwealth,” she said. “Old friends will not be lost; Britain will take her Commonwealth links into Europe with her.” The goal, she added, was “to create a wider family of Nations.”
The Christmas message now had an updated format that she had adopted following the success of the
At the same time, the British tabloid press was beginning to take a more aggressive and sensational approach to the royal family. In the lead were
PERHAPS INEVITABLY, THE British media turned its attention in the 1970s to the younger generation of the royal family, Charles and Anne in particular. After his graduation from Cambridge in 1970, Charles had faithfully followed his family’s plan and entered the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth a year later. In the eyes of the press he became an adventuresome figure called “Action Man.” As he began his naval career, he met Camilla Shand, a pretty and sporty debutante one year his senior. She had a “slightly sexy, ginny voice,” and above all she knew how to make the Prince of Wales relax and laugh. Their quiet romance lasted some six months before he left for a long tour at sea. While he was away, Camilla married Andrew Parker Bowles, a Household Cavalry officer, news that gave Charles a “feeling of emptiness.”
Andrew Parker Bowles had also briefly dated Princess Anne, but as a Roman Catholic he was unsuitable for marriage to a member of the royal family. To her older brother’s “shock and amazement,” twenty-two-year-old Anne announced her engagement in May 1973 to twenty-four-year-old Mark Phillips, a handsome army captain and accomplished equestrian who had won a gold medal at the Mexico City Olympics in 1968. They had met at a party for the British team after the games, although they conceded it hadn’t been love at first sight. “We had to be told that we’d met in 1968 before we remembered,” Anne recalled. Charles initially dismissed Mark as dull and dim, but quickly sympathized with his future brother-in-law’s abrupt introduction to the “interest, fascination (plus boorishness) shown by the press.” The Queen and Philip considered Mark suitable enough. Like Tony Snowdon, he was a commoner. Although unprepossessing, Mark shared Anne’s passion for horses and eventing.
They were married on Wednesday, November 14, Charles’s twenty-fifth birthday, at Westminster Abbey before 1,500 guests in a ceremony presided over by the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Queen, in a bright blue coat and dress, smiled as Anne and her husband climbed into the famous Glass Coach for the trip back to Buckingham Palace for the wedding breakfast with family members. When they made the ritual appearance on the Palace balcony, a crowd of fifteen thousand cheered.
The day had been declared a national holiday, allowing tens of thousands of spectators to line the route of the procession. Hundreds of millions more in sixteen countries watched on television. As at the wedding of the Queen and Philip a quarter century earlier, the pageantry of their daughter’s celebration—the coaches, the military bands, the sixteen trumpeters playing the fanfares, the guard of honor—struck a bright spark at a particularly bleak moment for Britain.
Since Heath took office, the economy had been ravaged by inflation and high unemployment. His attempt to restrain wage demands by the powerful miners’ union had foundered after a crippling strike, and his efforts to freeze pay, prices, rents, and dividends late in 1972 proved ineffective as well. A perfect storm of crises in the autumn of 1973 nearly brought the country to a standstill. OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, had raised the price of oil by 12 percent early in 1973, and the Yom Kippur War in October after Egypt and Syria invaded Israel led to an outright oil embargo against the United States and Western Europe. Fuel supplies dwindled and costs quadrupled, even as the coal miners threatened yet another strike. On December 13, Heath announced he would impose a three-day workweek and mandatory power cuts to conserve energy.
The Queen felt it would be appropriate to inject a note of sympathy about her country’s plight into her Christmas broadcast that year. Although her message was purely personal, and not written on advice from the government, she asked Martin Charteris to notify Heath that she wished to conclude her remarks with a “few sentences” about the crisis: “I cannot let Christmas pass without speaking to you directly of these difficulties because they are of deep concern to all of us as individuals and as a nation. Different people have different views, deeply and sincerely felt, about our problems and how they should be solved. Let us remember, however, that what we have in common is more important than what divides us.”
The next day in their audience, Heath informed the Queen that she could not mention the crisis. Undaunted by his censorship—which was not revealed to the press—she tried again. Charteris wrote Heath to propose a shortened but no less anodyne single sentence, this time for the beginning of the broadcast: “I cannot let Christmas pass without speaking to you directly of the hardship and difficulties with which so many are faced because they are of deep concern to all of us as individuals and as a nation.” But again Heath rebuffed the Queen’s efforts, instructing his private secretary to tell her she had to omit any reference because of the country’s “altogether exceptional circumstances.” She had no choice but to comply.
In the new year, the miners went on strike, and the three-day week conjured up images of the dire postwar
