leaders—a repressive dictator educated in the United States and Scotland who had practiced medicine in the United Kingdom, where he took to wearing Homburg hats and three-piece suits.
Elizabeth II arrived in Lusaka on July 27, 1979, two days before Thatcher, for meetings with Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda in which she urged him to subdue the anti-British rhetoric in the local press. During the four-day Commonwealth conference she followed her customary routine as the organization’s symbolic head by hosting a reception and banquet for all forty-two leaders. That evening she uncharacteristically stayed until nearly midnight, “quartering the room and talking to the various heads of governments,” recalled Chief Emeka Anyaoku of Nigeria. “I am convinced that the intervention spurred the organization—which was on the point of possibly splitting up—on to compromise.”
Her informal role continued behind the scenes, when she received each leader in a private audience for fifteen to twenty minutes in her bungalow. In those sessions, particularly with the Africans, she conveyed sympathy for their position without explicitly stating her own, and they came away impressed by her knowledge of their problems. By bringing down the temperature, the Queen made it easier for Thatcher to move toward the Commonwealth position, which others, notably her own foreign secretary, Peter Carrington, and Australian prime minister Malcolm Fraser, had openly urged her to do. The African leaders yielded as well, agreeing to consider a formula for some white representation in Rhodesia’s new parliament.
No one could pinpoint what exactly the Queen had done beyond playing what Carrington called “an enormous role in calming everything down.” By the end of the meetings, Thatcher signed the Lusaka Accord calling for a constitutional conference at London’s Lancaster House in September. The Queen “talked to Mrs. Thatcher and to Kaunda,” said Sonny Ramphal of Guyana, the Commonwealth’s secretary-general at the time. “The fact that she was there made it happen.”
Britain’s prime minister enthusiastically embraced the peace process, which led to an agreement on December 21 calling for a cease-fire, free elections, and Rhodesia’s independence in April 1980 as the Republic of Zimbabwe, the forty-third member of the Commonwealth, with Robert Mugabe as prime minister. Only in time did Thatcher’s initial misgivings about Mugabe prove prescient, as he set himself up as an egregiously corrupt dictator, brutally crushed his political rivals, drove the white farmers from their land, and destroyed what had been Africa’s most vibrant agricultural economy. In 2002 the Commonwealth suspended Zimbabwe’s membership, and Mugabe permanently withdrew the following year.
SHORTLY AFTER RETURNING to England from Africa on August 4, 1979, the Queen headed to Balmoral for her annual holiday. Whenever she and Philip are having lunch together in the castle, courtiers are forbidden from disturbing them except in an emergency. So at midday on Thursday, August 27, when Robert Fellowes, her assistant private secretary, entered the dining room, Elizabeth II knew he bore bad news. That morning, during a holiday at the Mountbatten vacation home at Sligo in the Republic of Ireland, a twenty-seven-foot fishing boat carrying six members of their family and a local boy had been blown up by an IRA bomb. Philip’s uncle and the Queen’s cousin, seventy-nine-year-old Dickie Mountbatten; John Brabourne’s eighty-three-year-old mother, Doreen; Nicholas Knatchbull, one of the Brabournes’ fourteen-year-old twin sons; and Paul Maxwell, the fifteen-year-old Irish boy, had been killed. Patricia and John Brabourne and their surviving son, Timothy, were critically injured.
The Queen and her family were grief-stricken. Prince Charles considered Mountbatten “his closest confidant and the greatest single influence.” Writing in his diary, Charles described his great-uncle as “someone who showed enormous affection, who told me unpleasant things I didn’t particularly want to hear, who gave praise where it was due as well as criticism.… Life will
The Queen called the hospital and had a long conversation with family members, but only Philip wrote a condolence letter. As a Red Cross doctor explained to Patricia Brabourne, “That kind of private person has strong feelings but doesn’t want to convey them. She would feel what she might say would be totally inadequate, so why try.” By contrast when her sister Pamela Hicks once wrote a note about the death of one of the royal corgis, the Queen replied with a six-page letter. “A dog isn’t important,” Hicks figured, “so she can express the really deep feelings she can’t get out otherwise.”
The royal family traveled to London for a full ceremonial funeral at Westminster Abbey on September 5, with massed military bands and 122 naval ratings pulling the gun carriage holding Mountbattten’s coffin. The earl had planned every detail of his commemorative ceremony, and there had been numerous rehearsals in the previous week. When the family boarded the train to Romsey for the burial, the Queen said to her cousin Pamela, “Please sit with me and tell me everything that happened.” “She hardly made any remark,” Pamela Hicks recalled. “But she absolutely listened to every word.” After the interment, the family gathered at Broadlands. In the absence of her parents, who were still hospitalized, Joanna Knatchbull, the eldest of the Brabournes’ daughters, served as hostess, waiting at the front door. Elizabeth II stepped out of the car, her eyes reddened from crying. “Ma’am, would you like to go upstairs?” Joanna inquired. “Yes I think I would,” replied the Queen.
A month later, Elizabeth II made her most meaningful gesture when she invited fourteen-year-old Timothy Knatchbull to stay at Balmoral after his release from the hospital. He arrived at the castle late at night with his older sister Amanda, when he spotted the Queen “striding down the corridor” like “a mother duck gathering in lost young.” She greeted Timothy and his sister with kisses, served them soup and sandwiches, took them to their rooms, and started to unpack until Amanda persuaded her that she should go to bed. “She was in almost unstoppable mothering mode,” Timothy recalled.
In the following days, the Queen monitored Timothy’s bedtimes, suggested when he shouldn’t attempt going out onto the grouse moor, and took care to ensure that her own doctor came to dress his wounds. “She was caring and sensitive and intuitive,” he said. Seated next to him at lunch, she seemed to sense his need to talk about the terror attack. “She didn’t probe. She has a brilliant way of using her ears as magnets and getting people to talk. I spoke to her in a way I hadn’t spoken, articulating things other people hadn’t drawn out of me.”
When Prince Charles pondered the manner of his Uncle Dickie’s death, he wrote, “I fear it will take me a very long time to forgive those people.” Princess Margaret reacted even more harshly. During a visit to Chicago that autumn, when someone expressed sympathy over the attack, she said the Irish were pigs. Elizabeth II kept her own counsel. “She had all the feelings of hurt and shock one could expect,” said Timothy Knatchbull. “I would be surprised if she hadn’t had flashes of anger and incredulity. But never has she departed from her high standards: a caring dignified stance, and a recognition that the peoples of both the United Kingdom and Ireland have sufferings and wounds of their own.” In their many conversations, he saw “no evidence whatsoever” that she had hardened her views of Ireland.
One unlikely source of consolation for Prince Charles was his long-ago love, Camilla Parker Bowles, by then the mother of two children with a husband who was openly unfaithful. In 1979, after the birth of her second child, she and Charles had resumed their romance, a development noted by Andrew Parker Bowles’s fellow officers in the Household Cavalry. One of them reported the affair to the Queen, who took it in but said nothing to her son.
AT THE SAME time, Charles had become acquainted with Lady Diana Spencer, the granddaughter of the Queen Mother’s longtime friend and Woman of the Bedchamber, Ruth Fermoy (widow of the 4th Baron Fermoy), and the daughter of the Queen’s former equerry Johnnie Spencer, the 8th Earl and scion of one of the great landed Whig families, with a fortune dating from the Middle Ages. The Spencers had been part of the group of English noblemen that had saved Britain from Catholic rule by bringing the Protestant Hanovers to England in 1714, a legacy that gave Diana a feeling of superiority over the royal family. Much later, after her marriage to Charles had fractured, she told her divorce lawyer, Anthony Julius, that she regretted marrying into a “German family.”
Johnnie Spencer had been with the Queen and Prince Philip on their six-month Commonwealth tour after the coronation. Before they departed in November 1953, he had proposed to Frances Roche, the daughter of Ruth Fermoy, but he left the tour—highly unusual for a courtier—after only two months to return to England. “By the time we reached Australia, he was so love struck with Frances that the Queen said, ‘Johnnie you have to go back,’ ” recalled Pamela Hicks, then a lady-in-waiting.
The Spencers lived at Park House in Norfolk, which they rented from the Queen, and had three daughters— Sarah, Jane, and Diana—and a son, Charles. But while they lived only a stone’s throw from Sandringham, the family only had occasional contact with their royal neighbors after Johnnie resigned from the Queen’s household to make his living as a gentleman farmer. In September 1967, when Diana was six, Frances left her husband for her lover, Peter Shand Kydd, which led to an acrimonious divorce followed by Frances’s marriage to Shand Kydd. Sarah and Jane Spencer were away at boarding school, so Diana and her three-year-old brother felt the brunt of the bitterness—an experience that marked Diana deeply and contributed to her lifelong emotional instability. At age nine she went to the first of two boarding schools, both of which provided a nurturing environment, although she
