Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

cancer. Plunket was admitted to King Edward VII hospital in mid-March, but after several days he insisted on leaving to attend an important reception at Buckingham Palace, saying, “I have to put on my white tie and medals.” His pain dulled by morphine, he was driven to the Palace, where he retrieved his evening clothes from his room and announced all the guests. He finally returned to the hospital at 2 A.M. Hours later he found a letter on his breakfast tray from the Queen saying, “Patrick, I’m deeply grateful for what you did last night, Yours sincerely, Elizabeth R.”

Patrick Plunket died ten days later on Easter Sunday at age fifty-one. The Queen honored him with a funeral in the Chapel Royal inside St. James’s Palace, with plangent music sung by boy choristers. It was a small group— just members of the Plunket family along with the Queen and Philip. The royal couple also attended the standing- room-only memorial service in the Guards’ Chapel across St. James’s Park, where Philip read the lesson. At the funeral, Annabel Goldsmith glanced at the Queen and “caught a look of deep sadness.”

According to Plunket’s brother Shaun, the Queen had a hand in the Times obituary. “She certainly helped,” he said. “It was quite light. There was a quotation that referred very much to his service.” But she sent no condolence note, as is her custom. “I don’t think we would have expected her to write,” said Shaun Plunket. “We knew she missed him and that we missed him. She didn’t have to put it on paper.” His will designated that one of his favorite possessions, a seascape by the nineteenth-century English artist Richard Parkes Bonington, be given to the Queen. After his brothers presented it to her in her study at Buckingham Palace, she wrote them a gracious note of thanks.

She further expressed her gratitude by approving a distinctive memorial, a white pavilion atop a hill above the Valley Gardens in Windsor Great Park, with an engraved plaque saying, “In memory of Patrick Plunket for his service to the Royal Family.” It was built with funds from his relatives and friends, including the Queen, Philip, and the Queen Mother. Elizabeth II took an interest in the design as well as the landscaping. “I’m sure I told the gardener I don’t care for variegated hostas,” she told Shaun Plunket on one inspection tour. “I can’t think of why he put those there.” Since the memorial is only minutes away from Smith’s Lawn, where the Queen often comes to watch polo, she has walked over occasionally to sit on the bench and reflect.

With Plunket’s death, the Queen lost not only a confidant but the sprightly tone he brought to court life. Her entertainments seemed more conventional, her guest lists less venturesome. Some even believe that if he had lived, he could have managed Diana, Princess of Wales, more effectively than anyone else in the royal household. A year after his death, someone asked the Queen, “Have you given some thought to who will replace Patrick Plunket?” Replied the Queen, “No one will ever replace him.”

She restated the pledge of lifelong

service that she had made

on her twenty-first birthday

“in my salad days when I was

green in judgment. I do not

regret or retract a word of it.”

The Queen wearing a hat trimmed with twenty-five small fabric bells, greeting the crowds celebrating her Silver Jubilee, June 1977. Getty Images

TWELVE

Feeling the Love

PATRICK PLUNKET’S PASSING WAS THE QUEEN’S FIRST MAJOR LOSS since the death of her father twenty- three years earlier, and she dealt with it by drawing on what one of her longtime friends calls her “profound religious existence,” dating to her childhood, and reinforced by her consecration in 1953.

As the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, the monarch is the defender of the faith—the official religion of the country, established by law and respected by sentiment. Yet when the Queen travels to Scotland, she becomes a member of the Church of Scotland, which governs itself and tolerates no supervision by the state. She doesn’t abandon the Anglican faith when she crosses the border, but rather doubles up, although no Anglican bishop ever comes to preach at Balmoral.

Elizabeth II has always embraced what former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey called the “sacramental manner in which she views her own office.” She regards her faith as a duty, “not in the sense of a burden, but of glad service” to her subjects. Her faith is also part of the rhythm of her daily life. “She has a comfortable relationship with God,” said Carey. “She’s got a capacity because of her faith to take anything the world throws at her. Her faith comes from a theology of life that everything is ordered.”

She worships unfailingly each Sunday, whether in a tiny chapel in the Laurentian mountains of Quebec or a wooden hut on Essequibo in Guyana after a two-hour boat ride. But “she doesn’t parade her faith,” said Canon John Andrew, who saw her frequently during the 1960s when he worked for Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey. On holidays she attends services at the parish church in Sandringham, and at Crathie outside the Balmoral gates.

Her habit is to take Communion three or four times a year—at Christmas, Easter, Whitsunday, and the occasional special service—“an old-fashioned way of being an Anglican, something she was brought up to do,” said John Andrew. She enjoys plain, traditional hymns and short, straightforward sermons. George Carey regards her as “middle of the road. She treasures Anglicanism. She loves the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, which is always used at Sandringham. She would disapprove of modern services, but wouldn’t make that view known. The Bible she prefers is the old King James version. She has a great love of the English language and enjoys the beauty of words. The scriptures are soaked into her.” The Queen has called the King James Bible “a masterpiece of English prose.”

Because visiting clergymen preach at Sandringham and Balmoral, she often has them as houseguests. “The royal family treat clergy differently,” said a minister in the Church of Scotland. “They tend to relax with us. It can get pretty perky. They say what they think in front of us.” Once while visiting Sandringham, George Carey heard the Queen say to Princess Margaret, “Oh you silly woman.” “It wasn’t offensive,” Carey recalled. “It was part of the family banter, but there was still deep affection.” Occasionally the Queen’s itinerant pastors have offered inadvertent comic relief. “For the delicious meal we are about to receive, and for the intercourse afterwards, may the Lord make us truly thankful,” said a minister from Aberdeen before one dinner at Balmoral, which the Queen later recounted with perfect Scottish inflections for her friends.

In her role as head of state, Elizabeth II has known clergy high and low, from popes to parish priests. The American evangelist Billy Graham came several times to Windsor Castle to worship with her privately. She admired Graham, although when he asked her to sit in the royal box for his crusade at Wembley Stadium with a congregation of 100,000 people, she politely declined, drawing the line at such a public display.

She sees the Archbishop of Canterbury in regular audiences a half dozen times a year, and as needed when important spiritual matters come up. She is friendly with the other top Anglican prelates as well, but is probably closest to the Dean of Windsor, who “takes the place of a family confessor,” said Margaret Rhodes. “He has contact with the Queen reasonably regularly because he is beside Windsor Castle. If she has things she would like to