To protest the new internment policy, some ten thousand Catholic demonstrators had defied a ban on large gatherings to march through the streets of Londonderry on January 30, 1972. A British paratrooper regiment was dispatched to the scene, and after being assaulted by rocks and other objects, the forces opened fire in the panicky melee, killing thirteen and injuring fourteen, one of whom died later. There were armed IRA operatives in the crowd, but all those killed were unarmed Catholics, many of them cut down as they were fleeing.
The killings became known as Bloody Sunday, a turning point that rapidly escalated the IRA’s battle to force a unification of Ulster and the Republic of Ireland. In the immediate aftermath, mobs burned down the British embassy in Dublin. The IRA boosted its membership with radicalized young recruits and intensified its campaign of terror against the British army and English civilians, along with Protestants in Northern Ireland, leading to thousands of casualties.
In several of her Christmas broadcasts after Bloody Sunday, the Queen had touched on what she called “our own particular sorrows in Northern Ireland,” extending prayers and sympathy to those who were suffering, and encouraging Protestants and Catholics working together for peace “to keep humanity and common sense alive.” She predictably bridled when officials had second thoughts in the summer of 1977 about her planned trip to Northern Ireland, just as she had resisted in 1961 when her trip to Ghana was nearly canceled. “Martin, we
On August 10, she landed on the grounds of Hillsborough Castle outside Belfast by helicopter—judged by her security advisers to be “the safest way for the Queen to travel.” It was her first trip on a helicopter, a means of transportation that had long made her nervous, despite her usual physical courage.
She was protected by extraordinary security during her two days in Ulster, with some 32,000 troops and police on alert. About seven thousand people were invited to her receptions, garden party, and investiture, all of which were broadcast on television. After visiting the New University of Ulster at Coleraine, she joined her family on
The second Commonwealth tour took her to Canada and the Caribbean for nearly three weeks. She returned from Barbados on November 2 by Concorde, the distinctive beak-nosed supersonic jetliner that had gone into service in January 1976. Her three-hour-and-forty-five-minute trip gave a futuristic flourish to the end of her 56,000 miles of jubilee travels.
On November 15 at 10:46 A.M., she became a grandmother at age fifty-one with the arrival of Anne’s first child, Peter Phillips. He was the first baby in the royal family to be born a commoner in five hundred years, since Mark Phillips had declined to take a title when he married Anne. They intended to raise their son—and his sister, Zara, born four years later—apart from the pressures of royal obligations, a decision that both children later welcomed.
That month Martin Charteris retired at age sixty-four after twenty-seven years of serving the Queen. Aside from Bobo MacDonald, no one in the royal household knew her better, had worked more intimately with her, or had seen her through so many stages of her life, from her formative years as a working princess through her grief over her father’s early death to her evolution as a confident and capable sovereign. He had in every respect lightened her load, not only with his keen judgment but with the verve he brought to her speeches and his gentle prodding to open her mind to new approaches.
They said farewell at a brief audience in Buckingham Palace. To help keep her emotions in check, Elizabeth II brought along her flinty daughter, who wouldn’t tolerate tears from her mother. “The Queen knew Martin would cry, and he did,” said Gay Charteris. “He was not inhibited by his emotions. She didn’t cry, and in her view, the least said, the better.” Some years later, Elizabeth II confided to her mother that when “my Martin” left, she missed him but she knew “he was still around if I needed to ask anything difficult.” All she said that morning at the Palace was, “Martin, thank you for a lifetime,” as she presented him with a silver tray inscribed with the same sentiment. When his tears abated, he mustered his customary levity. “The next time you see this,” he said. “It will have a gin and tonic on it.”
Prince Charles and his future wife Lady Diana Spencer with the Queen shortly after the announcement of the couple’s engagement, March 1981.
THIRTEEN
Iron Lady and English Rose
THE QUEEN’S SILVER JUBILEE SUCCEEDED IN LIFTING THE NATION’S spirits during a troubled time, much as her wedding had done during the postwar gloom. Prime Minister James Callaghan had been struggling to jump- start Britain’s stagnant economy from the moment of his election at age sixty-four in 1976. That year his government was forced to stave off bankruptcy with a loan of $3.9 billion from the International Monetary Fund. The money came with the sort of conditions—curbs on government spending and wage increases in the public sector— that were customarily imposed on developing countries.
The prime minister—nicknamed “Sunny Jim”—was an avuncular presence in his weekly meetings with the Queen, who was fourteen years his junior. The son of a chief petty officer in the Royal Navy and a schoolteacher, he had entered the civil service as a tax collector when he was unable to afford a university education. An unabashed monarchist, he enjoyed his meetings with the Queen, relieved to be in a setting where “conversation flowed easily and could roam anywhere over a wide range of social as well as political and international topics.” After spending fifteen minutes or so on three prearranged agenda items, their talk over the next hour might touch on their families or perhaps the price of hay in Sussex, where he had a farm, compared to Norfolk or Scotland. Callaghan learned to respond adroitly to the Queen’s fascination with political personalities, and he came to admire her oblique way of getting across her points: how she “weighs up” the problems of her prime minister, hinting at her thoughts in a “pretty detached” manner, and avoiding direct advice.
At six foot one, he was the tallest of the Queen’s prime ministers, handsome, easygoing, ready with compliments and even mildly flirtatious. One week she memorably took him for a stroll in the Buckingham Palace gardens and coquettishly placed a sprig of lily of the valley in his buttonhole. Callaghan correctly summarized her evenhanded approach to all her prime ministers, with the exception of Winston Churchill, who was sui generis. “What one gets,” Callaghan said, “is friendliness but not friendship.”
For “poor old Jim Callaghan,” as the Queen Mother referred to him, the Tuesday evening interludes offered a brief moment of tranquillity amid political strife. Despite the compelling need for austerity, the unions plunged ahead in 1978 with demands for fat wage increases, which meant higher government spending to placate public employees. Throughout what became known as the “Winter of Discontent”—one of the coldest on record—the country was crippled by a series of strikes by truck drivers, hospital orderlies, trash collectors, ambulance drivers,
