It was raining cats and corgis by the time I arrived in Finsbury Park last Tuesday, a fact that only served, given the dubiousness of my mission, to make me feel the more furtive. Everyone was rushing about, trying in the midst of the downpour to get their shopping done, to catch their bus or to pick up their children, and yet here I was, having bunked off work, intending to spend the rest of the afternoon watching a film about the Queen.
Would there be anyone other than me at the four o’clock screening of the late Roger Michell’s documentary, Elizabeth: A Portrait in Parts, in this shiny new cinema in one of the most diverse and most noticeably bunting-free parts of London? I pictured a couple of pensioners, handbags on their knees, but even they seemed an unlikely prospect.
Sure enough, I made up precisely half of that afternoon’s audience, the other 50% comprising a young woman with a lanyard who looked almost as shifty as me. But then the film started, and all of this stuff – coolness; cynicism; the feeling that it is almost one’s duty, these days, to be a republican – slipped away. Michell’s film, modishly, does not feature any talking heads; there are no lickspittle royal biographers droning on, no over-eager royal correspondents pretending they know more than they do.
Rather, it is a mosaic: a collection of archive clips, artfully arranged to artfully chosen music. Occasionally, the monarch’s subjects, past and present, get to have their say. “It was worth the wait,” announces an ecstatic old lady, who has collapsed after standing too long at a royal garden party. “She [the Queen] looks after us all,” explains an adenoidal little girl who is about to celebrate the silver jubilee by eating half her bodyweight in buttercream. Mostly, though, it is just one image of the Queen after another, arranged in strictly non-chronological order.
Sometimes, she is tiny-waisted, and sometimes she bears the weight of middle age. Sometimes, she is smiling, and sometimes she is sombre-stern. At one point, Eamonn Andrews, best known now as the presenter of This Is Your Life, suddenly appears, and for a moment you experience a brief confusion. What? Is the Queen about to receive her very own Big Red Book? But no. In 1961, it turns out, she paid a visit to the children’s television show Crackerjack, on which occasion Andrews gave her a set of Crackerjack pencils for Anne and Charles – and she did not even have to play Double or Drop.
As I watched, various thoughts floated through my mind. I wished, briefly, that hats would make a comeback. I considered, resentfully, the way that the fairy cake has been superseded by the cupcake. I remembered, too, the evening when, as a young journalist, I was frisked by a security guard at the newspaper where I was then working, just in case I was leaving the building with an illicit copy of its extracts of Andrew Morton’s book Diana: Her True Story in my bag. Most of all, though, I thought, with rising awe, about time and how it passes, and of how the Queen, by dint both of her age and of her singular status, connects us to history; to events, both great and small.
You don’t have to be the kind of person who leaps happily to their feet at the sound of the national anthem to feel a sense of wonderment, perhaps even a small lump in your throat, at the sight of the Queen describing, a decade or so on, her return to London in the Royal Yacht Britannia after a long tour of the Caribbean in 1954. Winston Churchill had come aboard at some point, a prime minister who was, by all accounts, besotted with the young Elizabeth – and unlike her he did not see the Thames as dirty and industrial (the docks were then still all around).
As they passed the cheering crowds lining the river’s banks, he described it to her as “a silver thread”, one that ran not only through the city, but through Britain’s national story – and thanks to this, she said, she suddenly saw it in a quite different light herself. Her smile, at this point, seemed to suggest that she recollected Churchill as both ridiculously sentimental, and rather wonderfully so; as a human being who had access to thoughts and emotions often utterly alien to her, and which were all the more attractive to her for it.
But of course, I can’t be sure of this, or of anything. Like everyone, I make the Queen what I want her to be, irrespective of the facts, which are in any case scant. One of the strangest books about her, of all the hundreds and thousands that have been published since she acceded to the throne in 1952, is surely The Crown Dissected, in which Hugo Vickers, “an acknowledged authority” on the royal family, carefully corrects the “facts” as they are portrayed in each episode of The Crown, the long-running series on Netflix.
Reading this peculiar display of pedantry, you can only think: this won’t change anything. It’s one thing to know, as I now do, that the Queen was born, not in a palace, but in a terraced house in Bruton Street in Mayfair (the London home of her maternal grandfather) at a time (1926) when there was still an old soldier alive who could describe the Charge of the Light Brigade (because he – his name was Edwin Hughes – had taken part in it). It’s quite another to insist on moods and opinions and feelings. We decide what we think about these things – the Queen was, for instance, horribly cold-hearted to remain closeted with her family at Balmoral after the death of Diana until, that is, she returned in London to talk to the crowds, at which point she was just a protective grandmother – and this is half of the point of monarchy. The mystery that surrounds the Queen, the fact that she is, and always has been, a repository for our high emotions, is her greatest asset. Charles’s biggest problem, when he becomes King, is going to be that we know far too much about him.
But, anyway: facts. Stick to them, and there’s no getting away from the simple truth that the monarch both reflects and subtly shapes the world we live in; that she herself is a silver (at this point, platinum) thread that runs through our collective story, whether we like it or not. There is barely anyone living who remembers a time when she wasn’t here, as princess or queen. When she stepped off the plane that brought her home from Kenya following the death of her father, George VI, wartime rationing was still in place. There were no motorways or supermarkets. Britain still had the death penalty. The Korean war was still being fought. Here was a shiny new Queen, and yet women in Britain could not yet take out mortgages in their own name, nor be fitted with a diaphragm without first producing a marriage certificate (the pill was not yet invented).
This was, moreover, a young woman who as a child had been told stories by JM Barrie, the author of Peter Pan; in whose newly inherited houses chefs still used copper saucepans engraved with the initials VR (for Victoria Regina; according to Robert Hardman, author of the recent Queen of Our Times, they do so even today); and whose makeup, at her coronation, would be done by Oscar Wilde’s daughter-in-law. The fortitude that many people feel has seen her through the 70 years of her reign, already in place in 1952, was very much born of the past. Unlike many other European royals, Elizabeth and her sister, Margaret, were not sent abroad for the duration of the second world war, years in which Buckingham Palace took no fewer than nine direct hits, the King worried constantly that the royal air raid shelter was too flimsy, and the grounds of Sandringham House in Norfolk were ploughed up, the better that land girls might farm them.
Turn your gaze forward, on the other hand, and this is the same woman who will hand the Beatles their MBEs and the World Cup to the captain of England; who will meet men – Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins and Neil Armstrong – who have walked on the moon; who will open, in spite of the disapproval of her mother, the Channel tunnel. She will have dinner with Boris Yeltsin in the country where her husband’s Romanov cousins were murdered; she will ride in a carriage through the streets of London with Nelson Mandela, smiling all the way; and she will shake the hand of Martin McGuinness, the politician who was once an IRA commander, the terrorist group that assassinated Lord Mountbatten, her father’s cousin and her husband’s uncle. Commentators often note that the Queen has known no fewer than 14 American presidents in her life, from Truman on, but to me the more amazing fact is that she has met every Labour prime minister there has ever been (“I saw you in Punch this morning, Mr MacDonald, leading a flock of geese!” she said, on being introduced to Ramsay MacDonald as a child). Suez, the Profumo scandal, the Falklands war, the fall of the Berlin wall, the prorogation of parliament: she saw them all. Also, doubtless from between her fingers, It’s A Royal Knockout.
Family life, of course, has not been straightforward – and in this sense, she is both like us, and very unlike us. The annus horribilis that was 1992, in which the Duchess of York was caught sucking toes that did not belong to her husband, the Prince and Princess of Wales separated, and Windsor Castle caught fire, was not a one-off. More recently, there have been the sexual abuse allegations against Prince Andrew, and the decision of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex to give an interview to Oprah Winfrey in which they suggested the royal family is racist.
But perhaps the Queen is better equipped than most to bear the sickly limelight that comes with such situations; it may be that she has the ability to screen herself off, to compartmentalise. Never forget that she is only Queen at all because her feckless Uncle David preferred a twice-divorced American to the crown; that she was, too, the sister of a woman whose private life was a mainstay of the redtops, and who wore her rudeness the way (to pinch from Craig Brown) Tommy Cooper wore a fez. The Queen is a good at obliviousness, something this must come in handy not only at Christmas, but when meeting the likes of Donald Trump.
Yet in other ways, she is far from oblivious. John Major has said that it was her decision, not the government’s, that she should begin paying tax – she grasped the public mood – and Hardman, among others, believes it was only thanks to the Queen that the system of primogeniture in the line of succession was abolished in 2011 (for decades, MPs from all parties had introduced bills on this, to no avail; only when she gave the idea the nod via her private secretary did the reform pass). Commentators insist she is no fuddy-duddy: she likes, they say, to try new things (one of these being gibnut, a rodent she once ate, freshly roasted, in Belize). She sat for Lucian Freud, in full knowledge of what his impasto might do to her complexion, and she has even mastered Zoom.
But again, all such talk, like every royal expert and every royal book, takes us in the end back to the same place: to a presence that is constant, but also unknowable; to a kind of corporeal absence. We can only think of her as we mostly do, which for the majority is with a weird, unwarranted fondness.
Even those for whom she embodies privilege and hypocrisy must admit that she gives them something to push against, and that this something is perhaps a more reliable, more romantic, even more attractive target than, say, than a president or a republic. When we watched her sitting alone in St George’s Chapel at the funeral of her husband of 73 years on 17 April 2021, she appeared before us as an everywoman figure. Didn’t she suffer, too? But the beauty and pomp, however diminished in that moment as a result of the pandemic, also reminded us that she is always and endlessly a person apart; that all of her power resides in this human scarcity.
In Michell’s film, there is some footage of the Queen lightly gossiping with Princess Anne backstage before a state banquet for Lech Walesa, the president of Poland, in 1991. She tells her daughter that Walesa is amazed by the size of everything, and that he seems to use only two words, and they both laugh, though not unkindly – at which point, a door opens and he appears, this trade unionist who fought so long and so bravely for his country’s freedom.
The Queen spins on her heel. “Good evening!” she says. Is the delight in her voice forced, or quite natural? I don’t know, but either way it falls on Walesa like a blessing; an imprimatur that is almost comical in terms of its visuals. Taking his place in the line of men and women whose hands this unmistakable figure in diamonds and a long dress has been happy to shake, he makes his way carefully towards his first drink.
