plate rather than drifting away during space travel.
For the fourth time, Philip declined the offer to see the legendary Kentucky bluegrass and instead flew home at the end of their nine-day working marathon. When Elizabeth II landed in Lexington for the weekend, Sarah Farish greeted her with a kiss on the cheek—a display of affection seen frequently in private among friends but rarely in public.
HER HECTIC DAYS in the United States were halcyon compared to what awaited her in London. The tabloids were working themselves into a speculative frenzy over the state of the Wales marriage as Charles and Diana approached their tenth wedding anniversary. Tabloid reporters knew that Charles had gone back to Camilla, and they were on the scent of Diana’s affair with James Hewitt as well. Andrew Morton of
Andrew and Fergie were misbehaving in their own way, living lavishly in a new fifty-room home called Sunninghill Park that the Queen had financed at an estimated cost of more than ?3.5 million. Their second daughter, Princess Eugenie, was born in 1990. But motherhood couldn’t match the allure of nightclub hopping in London and expensive vacations in Morocco, the Swiss Alps, and the south of France while Andrew was at sea. The tabloids took particular note of her getaways with thirty-five-year-old Texas millionaire Steve Wyattt.
The atmosphere of decadence and frivolity created by the Queen’s children led the editor of
In fact, the wheels were already turning quietly, albeit slowly, inside Buckingham Palace for the monarch to contribute her fair share. A prime mover was Robert Fellowes, who succeeded William Heseltine as private secretary in 1990 at age forty-nine. An Old Etonian and former officer in the Scots Guards, Fellowes was the most uniquely connected of all the Queen’s private secretaries. Not only was he a cousin of Fergie and brother-in-law of Diana, his father, Major Sir William “Billy” Fellowes, had been the Queen’s Land Agent at Sandringham for twenty- eight years. “This is the first time I have got a private secretary I held in my arms as a baby,” Elizabeth II said on making the appointment.
Fellowes was an eminently reliable counselor, having served the Queen in the private secretary’s office since 1977. He was scrupulously honest, abstemious in his habits (he rode a bicycle to work and carried his father’s battered leather briefcase), and completely loyal to the Queen. Yet behind his bespectacled reserve, he held surprisingly progressive views—to the extent that his friends in the men’s clubs in St. James’s regarded him as “a frightful pinko.” Even before the press began kicking up dust about taxes, Fellowes and his deputy, Robin Janvrin, had begun a discussion on the subject.
The Queen balked at first. She was worried about “exposing too much of the inner workings of the monarchy to the public gaze,” said one courtier. Of equal concern was her father’s insistence that immunity from taxation was a principle worth defending. But both Queen Victoria and King Edward VII had paid taxes on their incomes, and only under the reign of George V had that obligation been reduced and eventually eliminated.
After some study, Elizabeth II’s senior advisers concluded that an income tax would not be overly burdensome for the monarchy. When Fellowes presented their findings on her return to London from Sandringham early in 1992, he was prepared for stiff resistance, but she readily agreed to set up a working group of officials from the Palace and the government to prepare a detailed plan for her consideration. “She was not worried about how much she would pay,” recalled a courtier. The most persuasive argument was its symbolic importance—that “doing it could do the monarchy a lot of good.”
THE QUEEN WAS set to mark her fortieth year on the throne in 1992, an occasion that normally would call for celebration. But she chose to commemorate the anniversary in a subdued way, at least in part because the lives of her children were so unsettled. Andrew and Fergie had told the Queen at Christmas that they were considering a separation, and she asked them to postpone their decision for six months. Less than a month later the
In an effort to blunt the negative publicity and refocus attention on the purpose of the monarchy, Elizabeth II had allowed the BBC to follow her around in 1991 for a documentary intended to show how she went about her work. The resulting film,
The admiring portrait included a voice-over of her own reflections that she had recorded at the conclusion of the filming—not an interview per se, but an unusual personal statement similar to little noticed remarks she had made in previous films about racing and the Commonwealth. “Most people have a job and then they go home, and in this existence the job and the life go on together, because you can’t really divide it up,” she mused. “You have to sort of work out in your own mind the hard work, and then what you enjoy in retrospect from it.” She said she was accustomed to living “very much by tradition and by continuity,” adding rather forlornly, “I think this is what the younger members find difficult, the regimented side of it.” Most pointedly, she observed that hers was a “job for life,” putting to rest rumors floated by friends of the Prince of Wales that she would abdicate on her Accession Day.
The press greeted the film respectfully, praising its depiction of the Queen as a model of duty, sensibility, understatement, and wisdom. But even a well-crafted reminder of her worthy conduct couldn’t compete with the multiplying distractions of her family’s troubles, not to mention what one tabloid called “the dynamic sexiness of Princess Diana or the glorious naffness of Fergie.”
DIANA HAD REACHED a new and perilous stage in her relationship with the media—from realizing that she was a magnet for attention, to craving the attention, to seeking the attention, and now to using it as a weapon against Charles. In February, during their tour of India, she took aim with deadly accuracy by posing for photographers in “wistful solitude,” as the
Andrew and Fergie officially announced their separation in March, the divorce of Anne and Mark Phillips became final on April 23, and Fergie moved out of Sunninghill Park in May. But no one was prepared for the seismic events in June—a festive season that would ordinarily have been filled with tributes to the Queen’s milestone year.
On the 7th,
He was with the Queen on a state visit to Paris later that week when it became clear that Diana had deceived him. He immediately offered his resignation for embarrassing the press commission, but the Queen insisted that he remain in his job. Known for his integrity and lack of guile, Fellowes was astonished and angered by Diana’s dishonest behavior, which severely damaged their relationship and distanced the princess from her sister Jane Fellowes as well.
The Queen proceeded with her program in Paris even as she was fielding media queries behind closed doors from her forty-eight-year-old press secretary, Charles Anson. “Not once was there the slightest hint of annoyance,” recalled Anson, an unflappable and urbane veteran of two decades in the diplomatic service. “The doors would open and the Queen would walk out into the public gaze as if she didn’t have a care in the world.” She was, in fact, distressed. In consultations with Fellowes and her other advisers, she emphasized that despite Diana’s betrayal, she wanted to try to keep the marriage together, if only for the sake of William and Harry and to avoid any constitutional repercussions that might result for a divorced heir to the throne.
The second
