“She went as scheduled,” said a member of the royal household. “You never would have known. She was doing her duty, smiling, laughing, engaged in everything. Maybe privately she showed her grief, but we didn’t see it.” The Jamaicans gave a flag-waving welcome to the woman known in the local patois as “Missis Queen” and “The Queen Lady.”
The crowds in New Zealand and Australia surpassed expectations as well. Sir Edmund Hillary, whose conquest of Mount Everest had coincided with Elizabeth II’s coronation, attended a garden party for her in Auckland and said, “Most people much prefer to have a Queen as head of state rather than a broken-down old prime minister.” In Queensland thirty thousand people stood in the rain to hear her remarks at the “people’s day” fair. When Queenslander Ted Smout told her he was 104 years old, she said, “Oh, my mother is only 101!” In private she talked “constantly” of Margaret, and she called every day to check in with her mother. On her return to England on Sunday, March 3, she went immediately to Royal Lodge for a visit.
NEARLY A MONTH later, she was back at Windsor for Easter weekend. The Queen Mother had become noticeably weaker, but she had been lucid enough in the previous week to call friends and relatives with various instructions that were meant to be final wishes. On the morning of March 30, 2002—Easter Saturday—the Queen was out for her customary ride when she received a message from the doctors attending her mother that the end was approaching. When Elizabeth II arrived in her riding clothes, the Queen Mother was in a chair by the fireside in her dressing gown. The two women exchanged a few private words, and the Queen Mother did not speak again. Shortly afterward she closed her eyes and fell unconscious as Canon John Ovendon, chaplain of the Royal Chapel of All Saints in Windsor Great Park, held her hand and prayed.
Elizabeth II went back to the castle to change and returned to Royal Lodge with Margaret’s children, David Linley and Sarah Chatto. The Queen Mother’s niece and close friend Margaret Rhodes was there as well. She lived nearby in the Great Park and had been faithfully visiting her aunt every day. At 3:15 in the afternoon the Queen Mother died peacefully at age 101, surrounded by her surviving daughter, her two grandchildren, and her niece, all of whom were crying. Tony Blair spoke to the Queen that evening and found her “very sad but dignified.” Prince Charles, who was in Klosters, Switzerland, on a skiing holiday with his sons, rushed to Windsor the next day to pay his respects to the grandmother he called “the original life enhancer.”
The Queen Mother’s “Tay Bridge” funeral plan unfolded as she had meticulously planned. By custom, it was not called a state funeral—reserved for reigning monarchs, with rare exceptions such as Winston Churchill—but a royal ceremonial funeral that was identical in its trappings. The Queen and her advisers were concerned at first whether there would be sufficient public interest to justify the nine days of official mourning, including three days of lying in state. These misgivings were prompted in part by modest-sized crowds outside Buckingham Palace and lines for the condolence books at St. James’s Palace, and by coverage in admittedly pro-republican newspapers such as
By Friday, April 5, when the Queen Mother’s coffin was taken on a gun carriage in an elaborate procession from St. James’s Palace to Westminster Hall for the lying in state, the naysayers were proved wrong, as an estimated 250,000 people lined the route, in some places twenty deep. Draped over the coffin was her red, gold, white, and blue personal standard emblazoned with the familiar heraldic designs as well as bows and rampant lions from her family coat of arms. Resting on top was a wreath of white camellias bearing a card saying “In loving memory—Lilibet.” In front of the flowers was a purple velvet cushion holding the Queen Mother’s glittering coronation crown set with the legendary 105-carat Koh-i-Noor diamond.
The horses of the King’s Troop pulled the gun carriage, and 1,600 members of the armed forces representing regiments from Britain and the Commonwealth marched to the somber music of military bands accompanied by muffled drumbeats. Immediately following the coffin were all the male members of the royal family plus, for the first time, Princess Anne. Like her brothers Charles and Andrew, she wore a naval uniform with trousers, a privilege of her rank as an honorary rear admiral.
They met the Queen and Margaret’s daughter, Sarah Chatto, at the door of Westminster Hall, and the pallbearers carried the coffin to the seven-foot-high catafalque where George VI had lain in state five decades earlier. After the Archbishop of Canterbury conducted a brief prayer service for the family, the Queen and Prince Philip were driven back to Buckingham Palace. As she waved to the crowds, Elizabeth II’s expression was ineffably sad. As their car left Parliament Square and turned into Whitehall, the crowds of silent mourners unexpectedly burst into applause that continued along the Mall. “It was very emotional for her,” said one of her relatives. “It made her realize people really cared.” The Queen said that the moment was “one of the most touching things” that had ever happened to her.
When the soaring medieval hall was opened to members of the public, they stood in lines that stretched across the Thames and along the river’s south bank. After three days, more than 200,000 people—far more than expected—had filed past the catafalque to pay their respects. Officials had to extend the hours to accommodate as many mourners as possible. It was yet another dramatic demonstration of the monarchy’s entrenched popularity.
On Monday night before the funeral, the Queen gave a televised tribute to her “beloved mother” while seated in front of a window at Windsor Castle. Her message lasted just two minutes and fifteen seconds, but her voice was full of feeling as she spoke of her loss and her gratitude for “the outpouring of affection which has accompanied her death.” The extent of the tribute paid by “huge numbers of you” had been “overwhelming.” She hoped that at the funeral “sadness will blend with a wider sense of thanksgiving, not just for her life but for the times in which she lived.” And she expressed her thanks “for the support you are giving me and my family as we come to terms with her death and the void she has left in our midst. I thank you also from my heart for the love you gave her during her life and the honor you now give her in death.”
The Queen’s address was the culmination of a series of public gestures by the royal family to show their emotions in various ways. The previous Monday Prince Charles had given his own brief televised tribute from Highgrove, framed by photographs of the Queen Mother. He had struck an even more intimate tone than his mother’s as he catalogued the traits he adored in “the most magical grandmother you could possibly have.” He said he had “learnt so much from her of immense value to my life” and that together “we laughed until we cried—oh how I shall miss her laugh and wonderful wisdom born of so much experience and an innate sensitivity to life.”
Other members of the royal family also made an effort to connect with the public. Sophie Wessex, Princess Anne, her son, Peter Phillips, and husband, Tim Laurence, mingled with mourners waiting in line to visit the Queen Mother’s coffin. Just before the Queen’s broadcast, Princes Charles, Andrew, and Edward, along with Margaret’s son, David Linley, had stood at the four corners of the catafalque for a twenty-minute vigil.
The most unexpected response came from Princes William and Harry, aged nineteen and seventeen, who talked about the Queen Mother’s whimsical side in an interview. They described how they had taught their hundred-year-old great-grandmother to imitate Sacha Baron Cohen’s Ali G after she had watched the comedian on television. At the end of the family’s Christmas luncheon that year, she had stood up and declared, “Darling, lunch was marvelous—respec!” and clicked her fingers, Ali G style.
On Tuesday, April 9, Crown Jeweler David Thomas was up at 6 A.M. to clean and dust the crown on top of the coffin. A million people gathered along the funeral route, and more than eleven million watched on television. The congregation of 2,200 in Westminster Abbey included twenty-five members of European royal families, the Blairs, Thatchers, Majors, James Callaghan, First Lady Laura Bush, and United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan among numerous dignitaries. There were ordinary people as well who had known the Queen Mother through the more than three hundred charities of which she was patron or president. In the spirit of the Queen’s address, the midday funeral service combined solemn pageantry with reminders of how, “like the sun,” the Queen Mother “bathed us in her warm glow,” in the words of George Carey, the Archbishop of Canterbury. She embodied, he said, “one of the most fundamental of all roles and relationships—that of simply being a mother, a mum, the Queen Mum.”
A significant shift had taken place that week. For fifty years, Elizabeth II had deferred to her mother, and the object of that deference was gone. The Queen now took on the mantle of her mother’s role as well as her own. She moved up a generation and became the nation’s grandmother, or as Margaret Rhodes put it, “the senior royal lady.” Much as the Queen adored her mother, she had been slightly overshadowed by the Queen Mother’s merry and approachable presence, so beloved by the people. Elizabeth II had always been admired, but now the depth of affection for the Queen Mother began to merge with the equally deep respect for the Queen.
Still, the deaths of her sister and her mother within the space of six weeks gave seventy-five-year-old
