QUEEN MOTHER DEAD:

The British press described the Royal Family as “devastated” when it gathered at Windsor last Sunday, as the body of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother was borne on the first, short stage of a final journey that was to culminate in a royal ceremonial funeral next Tuesday (April 9).

That the rest of the country did not share their devastation was obvious within hours. Operation Lion, the detailed plan for the event of the “Queen Mum’s” death drawn up a decade ago by the British government and the broadcasters, originally envisaged television “going black” as national life ground to a halt for a week: no East Enders, no racing, no Coronation Street. In the event this did not happen. The floral tributes at Clarence House never amounted to a pile, and the milling crowd in The Mall—mostly composed of foreign tourists—was respectable in numbers but desultory in attitude. A snaking corridor of crowd barriers stretched for hundreds of yards in front of St James’s Palace, where people were expected to stand in line, waiting to be electronically frisked and have their belongings checked before signing a book of condolence. In the event a couple of hundred had turned up to sign on Easter Sunday, but there was hardly a queue and it never reached beyond the grounds of the Palace, where the barriers awaited. For many policemen in The Mall, whose leave had been cancelled and with it an Easter Sunday with the family, there was a sense that rather too much fuss was made for what turned out to be eminently modest and entirely unfocused outpouring.

The widow of the late King George VI, who died on March 30 at the age of 101, was widely assumed to be “popular,” but now we know that there was less than meets the eye. The Queen Mother no longer had a reliable target-audience whose affection she could command—the dwindling survivors of the Blitz who remember her 1940 gallantry notwithstanding—in the way that her much-hated granddaughter-in-law Diana could, in life and in death. There is some irony in the fact that among the royals the person who understood best the machinations involved in gaining the love of strangers was the young woman whom the Queen Mother could not abide.

Before there was any question of her becoming a royal personage, and shortly before her marriage to Prince Albert of York (as he was then) in 1923, Elizabeth Lyons had been described by an observer at a British Embassy ball in Paris as “a bewitching little figure in rose colour, which set off her lovely eyes and dark eyebrows to perfection. She seemed to me the incarnation of fresh, happy, English girlhood.” (Proud of her Scottish ancestry she would have corrected “English.”) She fitted well into the family circle of King George V, who astonished other members of his family by treating her unpunctuality—particularly at meals, where it would normally have driven him to fury—as a venial fault. She was fond of him and, unlike his own children, never afraid of him.

As Queen Consort from 1936 to 1952 she was well liked and an asset to the monarchy shaken by the abdication crisis that unexpectedly brought her husband to the throne. She probably would have preferred not to have the royal burden thrust upon her by the abdication of her brother-in-law Edward VIII, but it was not in her nature to behave as though that burden was too heavy, or even unpleasant. This had enabled her to turn even a tedious provincial function into a party. As a Times leader once said of her: “She lays a foundation stone as though she has discovered a new and delightful way of spending an afternoon.”

Her tough nature and steely interior were apparent already in the late 1930s, in her remorseless animosity to Edward, the frivolous king who forced her shy husband on to the throne and who spent the rest of his life in exile as the Duke of Windsor. She maintained an even more determined vendetta against his wife Wallis Simpson, the American divorcee for whom Edward gave up the crown in the 1936 Abdication Crisis. Elizabeth was by the standards of that time shockingly indiscrete in criticizing Wallis Simpson for her café-society commonness—and Wallis in turn called her “a fat cook” in front of anyone who happened to be within earshot, including her unprotesting husband. More than any other person—and certainly more that the meek and forgiving King George VI—the Queen was responsible for the virtual banishment from England of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

Like most British royals—with the possible exception of her much-adored oldest grandson Charles—she was a philistine. Her literary tastes were limited to P.G. Wodehouse. When asked once whether there was something she would really like to have instead of the usual formal presentation gift, the Queen Mother replied, “May I have the complete works of P.G. Wodehouse?” Nevertheless she cherished the company of artsy-fartsy types, especially if they were sodomists. The second half of her long life spent in widowhood was apparently sex-free, but to ensure lack of temptation in the early years of that period—while temptation was still feasible—her closest personal companions (some of them fancied themselves her friends) were homosexuals. Noël Coward, Cecil Beaton, Benjamin Britten, even the outrageous Stephen Tennant, hinted at a camp sensibility that always lurked under Elizabeth’s Establishment façade.

There was another reason for her need of “gay” friends: she was despised by the top aristocratic trend-setters, such as Nancy Mitford and Diana Cooper, who disparaged “her sweet-pea suits, and so on,” and appreciated the profuse flattery heaped on her by homosexuals. She even enjoyed being served by them: at cocktail hour at Clarence House, while waiting for her gin and Dubonnet, she would call down to the servants’ quarters: “I don’t know about any of you queens down there, but this Queen up here wants a drink.” The historian Hywel Williams has noted that the Queen Mother “brought into the Royal Family a very 1920s style of brittle suppression, which was part of a wider culture. Embarrassed by Victorian ardour and emotion, its ancestors in literature are Oscar Wilde and Ronald Firbank. Suddenly, it was smart to be hard—Noël Coward developed the style as a clipped heartlessness that has sunk deep into the Windsor consciousness.” As the Independent’s obituarist noted (April 3),

Williams even saw the then Duchess of York as an ‘emasculating femme fatale,’ as though she were herself one of Coward’s hard-bitten heroines . . . The status quo and a sense of discretion—if not suppression—was all-important for this royal version of Barbara Cartland. Yet she was no pantomime dame, for all the flowers and furbelows and winsome smiles. In that almost fey, whimsical and decidedly camp figure who would appear on birthdays and ceremonial occasions garbed in chiffon and bows, there was a sense of steel; what Truman Capote called an “iron-winged butterfly.”

Having the wings of steel is not sufficient to live to be 101, but it helps.