crowd of spectators wept outside the railings.
The Queen suffered yet another loss on September 11 when her friend of many years, Henry Carnarvon, was stricken with a fatal heart attack at age seventy-seven. Like Elizabeth II and millions around the world, Carnarvon and his wife, Jean, had been watching television as the horrors unfolded in the United States. Just after the second hijacked airplane hit the World Trade Center, he collapsed. In the ambulance on the way to the hospital, he turned to his wife and said, “Would you call the Queen?” He died shortly afterward in the operating room, and his daughter, Lady Carolyn Warren, phoned Balmoral with the news. “The Queen was devastated,” said Jean Carnarvon. “It was so unexpected. It caught us all.”
On Friday, September 14, the Queen joined a congregation of 2,700, most of them Americans, at St. Paul’s Cathedral for a memorial service honoring the September 11 victims. Prince Philip read the lesson, and everyone sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which hadn’t been heard there since the 1960s when it was played for John F. Kennedy and Winston Churchill. “When our National Anthem was played, I watched the Queen as she sang all the words,” recalled Jackie Davis, the wife of an official at the American embassy. “I thought to myself, ‘If she can do that, then I can learn the words to “God Save the Queen.’ ”
On September 20, Tony and Cherie Blair traveled to New York to participate in another memorial for the victims at St. Thomas’s Church on Fifth Avenue. The prime minister did a reading from Thornton Wilder’s
Tony Blair kept the Queen up to date on developments over the following weeks that led to the October invasion of Afghanistan by the United States, Britain, and other NATO forces. Their mission was to unseat the fundamentalist Muslim Taliban forces and root out the al Qaeda terrorists who had trained there for the devastating attacks. It was the first step in the global war on terrorism that escalated two years later with the invasion of Iraq and ouster of dictator Saddam Hussein, who was suspected of illegally making weapons of mass destruction intended for use against the United States and its allies.
From time to time during this period, Blair relied on the Queen for guidance. “Obviously there was a huge focus on the Arab world,” he recalled, “and that is something she has immense experience of. She has dealt with many of the royal families, with many of the ruling families, over a long, long period of time, and she has a lot of real insight into how they work, how they operate, how they think, the best way of trying to make sure that we reach out to them.”
LUCIAN FREUD UNVEILED
The painting is shocking in several respects, starting with its size: only nine inches by six inches. Because it is so small, it is peculiarly concentrated, showing only the Queen’s head and a small part of her shoulders. Without the diadem, she would be barely recognizable. “You gaze at it for half a minute,” said Clarissa Eden, who was also painted by Freud. “Suddenly you realize it is the Queen.” Her face is harsh, the expression a scowl, the eyes hooded, the skin a rough patchwork of white and orange streaks, the heavy chin with a masculine five-o’clock shadow.
Yet despite Freud’s failure to show such attributes as her expressive eyes and luminous skin, he does capture in a mesmerizing way the essence of her dutiful and determined nature, as well as her strength and stoicism. “This is a painting of experience,” said Adrian Searle, art critic for
Freud said the Queen looked at the portrait while she was being painted but she did not tell him what she thought. Sir Hugh Roberts, director of the Royal Collection, reflected the official Palace view when he called the portrait a “remarkable work.” Even more telling was a commentary by Jennifer Scott, the assistant curator of paintings for the collection, who wrote that it “feels real and earthy, almost as if Freud peeled away the layers of deportment that come so naturally to a monarch and painted the person underneath.”
CHRISTMAS AT SANDRINGHAM was unsettled that year. Margaret, now seventy-one, had suffered two more strokes in the beginning of 2001, leaving her partially paralyzed and bedridden as well as blind. When she made a brief appearance at the one hundredth birthday party for her aunt Princess Alice, the Dowager Duchess of Gloucester, on December 12 at Kensington Palace, Margaret wore sunglasses, and her face was swollen from steroid medications. Anne Glenconner, Margaret’s longtime friend and Norfolk neighbor, came to Sandringham and arranged to have a television installed in the princess’s room, along with a hot plate so her nurse could make scrambled eggs. “What a good idea!” the Queen said. Prince Charles was especially solicitous, sharing with Anne Glenconner the task of reading aloud to his aunt, who by then could barely speak. “Her quality of life was not good,” said Glenconner.
Four months past her 101st birthday, the indomitable Queen Mother was fading as well. She came down with a respiratory infection that kept her confined mainly to her room at Sandringham. In early February, Margaret was driven back to Kensington Palace, while her mother remained in Norfolk to recuperate. As the princess was wheeled to the car, the Queen Mother “carried out the family tradition of waving a white handkerchief in farewell.”
Accession Day, on February 6, was usually observed privately by the Queen. But to mark the fiftieth anniversary of taking the throne, she not only appeared publicly, she sent out a message of thanks with a modern twist—on the Internet through her official jubilee website. She started the day at Sandringham with an early morning ride, then traveled by car to nearby King’s Lynn to open a new cancer unit at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, where she talked to patients and toured the facility. Her visit was intended in part as a tribute to her late father’s struggle with lung cancer.
Two days later, Margaret had another stroke. After she showed signs of heart problems, she was rushed to King Edward VII Hospital late that night. With her son and daughter at her bedside, the princess died at 6:30 A.M. on Saturday, February 9. The Queen was at Windsor Castle, while Philip had stayed on at Sandringham for a shooting weekend. Charles immediately drove to Norfolk to console his grandmother. Resolutely positive as always, she told her grandson that her daughter’s death “had probably been a merciful release.”
Margaret’s funeral took place at 3 P.M. in St. George’s Chapel on Friday the 15th—fifty years to the day since her father, King George VI, was laid to rest. She had been eligible for a “royal ceremonial funeral,” but her wish was to “depart without a fuss,” so she requested a “royal private funeral,” by definition a less public ceremony. Unusually for a member of the royal family, she also requested cremation, with instructions that her ashes be placed with her father’s remains in his vault at the chapel.
The princess had selected the readings and the music for the service, which showed not only what her good friend George Carey called her “rooted and firm” adherence to the Church of England, but her love of ballet. As the 450 mourners entered the chapel, the organist played Tchaikovsky’s
The Queen Mother had fallen at Sandringham and cut her arm two days earlier. But she had insisted on attending the funeral, and the previous day had been flown to Windsor by helicopter. She arrived at the chapel by wheelchair after the Queen and was seated near her daughter’s coffin, which was covered with Margaret’s personal Royal Standard and arrangements of white roses and pink tulips.
Following the service, eight Royal Highland Fusiliers in tartan trousers and dark jackets carried out the coffin as trumpeters sounded “The Last Post” and “Reveille.” A bagpiper played “The Desperate Struggle of the Bird,” which seemed a suitably melancholy lament for a princess who had seen so much unhappiness. The Queen Mother managed to stand briefly as Margaret’s coffin passed, and she kept her emotions in check, but as the Queen stood outside the chapel watching the coffin being placed in the hearse, she lowered her head to wipe away tears. “It was the saddest I have ever seen the Queen,” said Reinaldo Herrera, Margaret’s good friend.
By the time family members joined Elizabeth II at the castle for tea afterward, she had regained her composure. She was already turning her attention to her departure in three days for Jamaica, the first stop on a two-week Golden Jubilee Commonwealth tour that would also take her to New Zealand and Australia.
