There is nothing faster in the known cosmos, Terry Pratchett once reflected, than the speed of monarchy. The transfer of divine rule completes its journey while light is still fiddling with its seat belt. The first that King Charles knew of his upgrade on September 8, 2022, came with the second word uttered to him on the phone by Sir Edward Young as he drove in his Land Rover near Balmoral and that subtle shift in the private secretary’s greeting to “Your Majesty”, but he had become King a little earlier, at the very moment Queen Elizabeth II took her final breath.
Once the news broke, Britain entered its traditional period of lunacy. Graham Wilson from High Wycombe spent $1,800 having his left thigh tattooed with two images of Elizabeth, at her coronation and in old age. “Beth, the tattooist, had a cancellation, so it was meant to be,” he explained.
In Telford, a golden cloud in the shape of her head was spotted in the sky; in Sunderland, a large wave was also said to show a remarkable resemblance.
Morrisons turned down the volume of the beeps on its tills as a sign of respect; Guinea Pig Awareness Week was postponed at a West London school; Norwich city council put a notice on a bike rack saying that it would be closed for the time of mourning; Stephen Fry, in his role as luvvie laureate, penned a 22-word tweet de tristesse that included “oh” five times and a “bless my soul”.
If you are the sort who finds that such sycophantic silliness makes your blood boil, this might not obviously be the book for you, yet it is far from a toadying hagiography. As with his previous books on Princess Margaret, Ma’am Darling, and the Beatles, One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time, Craig Brown takes a different approach to writing biography, foraging extensively through newspaper cuttings and diaries to find nuggets and trifles and build a 120-chapter anthology that reveals more about how people viewed his subject and how they viewed themselves than the deep secrets of the woman on the cover.
A chapter on honors, for instance, tells us that the grand poet Edith Sitwell liked to correct those who called her Dr after she became a dame, while Somerset Maugham complained when he was invited to be a Companion of Honor in 1954 because he thought he should get the Order of Merit. “It means ‘very well done, but …’” he grumbled. Thomas Hardy, Maugham added spitefully, had been an OM and wasn’t he as great as that Wessex writer?
If you are the sort who finds that such sycophantic silliness makes your blood boil, this might not obviously be the book for you, yet it is far from a toadying hagiography.
William Walton, on the other hand, burst into tears when his OM arrived in 1967. “To think that the Queen actually knows I am alive,” gushed the composer, who we are told elsewhere had smuggled a supply of whiskey miniatures into his top hat to get him through a coronation for which he wrote a Te Deum.
A section on the dreams that people have confessed to having about her is also revealing, too much so with Paul Theroux, who sought relief for depression in her kindly offered bosom, “her nipples cool against my ears”. Peter Ling, one of the creators of Crossroads, had a recurring dream about taking tea with Her Majesty. On waking he would bore his wife with tales of how nice she was so often that she begged him to stop. Ten years later she had her own dream of tea at the palace and told Ling: “I see what you mean. She really is awfully nice.”
Others were terrified of meeting her. Kingsley Amis confided to a pal before lunch with the Queen in 1975 that he had been so worried about an unpremeditated fart or belch that he had gone on a strict no-bean-and-onion diet.
Over a life of 96 years and a reign of more than 70, she was the most famous woman on the planet. She received her first biography when she was four: 127 pages of gush by her mother’s governess about how this divine baby had the bonniest smile and the whitest skin. A later memoir by her nanny, “Crawfie”, led to her ostracism for betraying such secrets as how the Duchess of Kent had mimed the phrase “royal flush” in a game of charades, or how the seven-year-old Lilibet, in a very rare act of rebellion, had tipped a silver inkpot over her head during a French lesson in irritation at Mam’zelle.
Kingsley Amis confided to a pal before lunch with the Queen in 1975 that he had been so worried about an unpremeditated fart or belch that he had gone on a strict no-bean-and-onion diet.
Brown’s book has little that is so twee. Some of it is extremely personal. We learn, for instance, that our King was circumcised a week before Christmas by a Dr Snowman (how festive!) and that one of Prince Philip’s aunts twice underwent surgery to move her clitoris closer to the point of penile contact, while an uncle owned one of the largest collections of pornography in, as it were, private hands.
He might have got on with WH Auden, who blew his chance of being made poet laureate in 1972 after the discovery of an obscene 30-verse poem he had written about oral sex for an underground magazine. It was decided that the job would be more safely offered to John Betjeman, who hated it. Philip Larkin, meanwhile, was relieved that it hadn’t gone to him, telling a friend that he would much rather write about Princess Margaret having to knock off booze and fags than the usual fare of the job. “Those bloody babies leave me cold,” he said.
It was Larkin, though, who perhaps got closest to identifying the strength of Elizabeth II with a verse for the Silver Jubilee. “In times when nothing stood/ But worsened, or grew strange/ There was one constant good:/ She did not change.”
Queen Elizabeth was a woman who excelled at avoiding controversy and was so allergic to giving an opinion that, in the words of the critic Dicky Buckle, “she would never, even under torture, admit that pink was her favorite color for fear of offending orange and mauve”. As the ten-year-old winner of an essay-writing competition on the coronation held by Liverpool Public Library (one P McCartney) would later write: “Her Majesty’s a pretty nice girl, but she doesn’t have a lot to say.”
The only things that seemed to excite her were dogs and horses — we learn that right at the end of her life, between her 14th British prime minister leaving her presence (Johnson) and her 15th arriving (Truss), she phoned her racing trainer to ask after the chances of Love Affairs in the 3.05pm at Goodwood — yet it was that very reassuring dullness, that unchanging certainty, that many needed. She was the nation’s bedrock. It is a strength of Brown’s excavating talents that he can fill 650 pages with so many attendant gems.
Patrick Kidd is the editor of the Diary column at The Times of London. A collection of work from his time as a parliamentary sketch writer, The Weak Are a Long Time in Politics, was published in 2019
