repair minor cartilage damage that her doctors had discovered. She walked for several weeks with a cane, but was soon back into her weekly riding routine. Her one concession to age was using Fell ponies as her mounts rather than the larger horses she had been riding for decades. “They are about 14 hands high, solid squat things,” said Michael Oswald. “Not many her age ride at all, so they are safe conveyances.”
With her mother and sister gone, Elizabeth II came to rely more on her extended family for companionship. Her long-standing ritual on Sundays at Windsor had been to have a midday drink at Royal Lodge after attending the service at the Royal Chapel of All Saints. Now she would go instead to visit her cousin Margaret Rhodes, a small and sprightly countrywoman. Her cottage in Windsor Great Park is simple and cozy, with modest furnishings and rubber toys for Gilda, her West Highland terrier, strewn on the floor. The tables in her sitting room are filled with photographs of the Queen Mother, King George VI, and Elizabeth II in her Balmoral garb.
When Margaret’s husband was stricken with terminal cancer in 1981, the Queen gave them the house so they could be closer to London hospitals than their farm in Devon. “How would you like to live in suburbia?” the Queen asked. “It was the answer to a prayer,” Margaret Rhodes recalled.
Each Sunday the Queen takes the wheel of her Jaguar for the short drive from the church. Her cousin greets her with a curtsy, and the Queen perches on the faded sofa in the sitting room, her hat firmly in place, ready for the return trip to the castle. As Elizabeth II sips her gin and Dubonnet, the two women talk about the events of the previous week, and swap news about family matters and various people they know—the health of an elderly stalker at Balmoral, for example.
The events of 2002—her personal losses as well as the acclaim for her jubilee—had turned a page, and the difficulties of the 1990s had now been relegated to history. The Queen was smiling more in public. She seemed warmer, more approachable, and more relaxed, in some ways more like her mother. “This may sound impertinent,” said Robert Salisbury, “but I would guess the Queen has rather blossomed since her mother died.” Monty Roberts felt that she was showing “more understanding of the wonders of life than she had before.”
During a small dinner in 2003 with a group of Grenadier Guards in the Officers Mess at St. James’s Palace—a handsome high-ceilinged room decorated with antiques, regimental silver, a wooden officers’ latrine door from the trenches of World War I, and a portrait of the young Queen Victoria—laughter and loud conversation could be heard through the open windows. A call came through from the Queen’s comptroller, Malcolm Ross, who had an apartment in the Palace. He was complaining about the noise, not knowing the identity of the guest that evening. The officer of the guard conveyed the message to the Queen, who replied, “Oh tell Malcolm not to be so silly.”
Robert Salisbury detected a shift in Elizabeth II’s manner when he was seated next to her at the seventieth birthday party for Ginny Airlie at Annabel’s in February 2003. The Queen told friends how much she had been looking forward to the party because it was the first time she had been in a nightclub since the early days of her marriage. “Never have I seen anyone have such a good time,” said Annabel Goldsmith (after whom the club had been named), who was also seated with the Queen. “Here was this austere woman laughing and joking. She was amusing the whole table.”
The next day, Elizabeth II had an engagement at St. Alban’s Abbey, north of London. As she was being introduced to dignitaries, the dean of the abbey spotted Robert Salisbury, and asked the Queen whether she had met him before. “Oh yes,” said the Queen in ringing tones. “Robert and I were in a nightclub last night till half past one.”
She also acquired a new confidante in Angela Kelly, who had taken Bobo MacDonald’s place. Twenty-five years the Queen’s junior, Kelly had been a soldier who joined the royal household as a maid and worked her way up through the ranks to dresser, a title Kelly herself upgraded to “personal assistant.” Like Bobo, who was the daughter of a railwayman, Kelly had modest origins in Liverpool, where her father worked in the dockyards. But unlike Bobo, who kept a low profile, Kelly, a plump blonde with an effervescent personality, became a visible presence in the Queen’s entourage.
When Kelly is with the Queen “there is lots of jolly laughter,” said Anne Glenconner. “She has moved into the vacuum created by the death of the Queen’s sister and her mother,” according to one of the Queen’s relatives.
Kelly tends to the royal wardrobe in a rigorously professional way, adapting the traditions of Hartnell and Amies with an eye to the theatrical requirements of the Queen’s public appearances. Kelly often accompanies household officials on reconnaissance trips (“recces”) for foreign tours, checking the backgrounds where the Queen will be appearing and researching national colors as well as hues that might have positive and negative significance. “Angela understands the Queen needs to wear something that sets her apart from the crowd when she is at a distance, and that inside she can wear beige and grey, things that are more neutral,” said a senior royal adviser. Kelly uses new couturiers such as Stewart Parvin, but she also designs many of the Queen’s dresses, coats, and hats herself and has them made in-house at lower cost.
The Queen has long taken a keen interest in her jewelry and knows the history of the pieces in her extensive private collection. She enjoys displaying her beautiful jewelry whether in public or private, sometimes at dinner parties wearing multiple rings, even on her index fingers. Once, when she was introduced to Joel Arthur Rosenthal, the American creator of JAR jewelers, at a Winfield House dinner, she said, “I have heard that Damien Hirst has been using diamonds to make a jeweled skull, but I prefer the diamonds around my neck.”
Angela Kelly has built on her boss’s expertise by developing computerized inventories so she can have the most up-to-date facts at her fingertips when she sets out a tray with pieces for the Queen’s selection. “Angela will come up with something she has found God knows where,” said a lady-in-waiting. “If the brooch is from Mexico, she will say where the stones are from. She is interested in it, and she makes it fun.”
ON WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2003, the Queen and her courtiers awoke to a “World Exclusive” in the
The newspaper tried to frame the stunt as a public service, but it was mainly a peek into the private lives of the Queen and her family. The most talked-about photograph was of the breakfast table laid for the Queen and Prince Philip with white linen, a floral centerpiece, silver cutlery, and bone china, along with an inexpensive transistor radio and three perfectly aligned Tupperware boxes containing cornflakes and porridge oats. Parry wrote that the Queen preferred her toast “with light marmalade,” but she ended up feeding most of it to the corgis under the table.
He reported that each royal tea tray had its own map, that Prince Andrew was a teetotaler who sometimes swore at his footman, and that Princess Anne required her breakfast bowl to “contain a very black banana and ripe kiwi fruit,” and went about her business “without a fuss.” Parry described Sophie Wessex as “kind and grateful,” and the Queen came across as chatty and congenial—“not nearly haughty enough for the job,” observed
Photographs and descriptions of the private apartments highlighted Andrew’s penchant for stuffed toys and pillows embroidered with messages such as “Eat, Sleep, and Remarry,” Anne’s sitting room where “every surface is covered with books, ornaments, piles of paper and magazines,” and Edward and Sophie Wessex’s modern decor and tidy housekeeping. Parry even snapped a picture of the carpeted Wessex bathroom adorned with a cartoon showing the Queen speaking to a group of penguins in “royal garments.”
The next day the
Parry recounted that the Queen dined alone while watching her surprisingly lowbrow choice of television programs:
