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Yes, you can access The Times Queen Elizabeth II by James Owen in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Historia & Biografías históricas. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
On November 24, 1992, the Queen had a heavy cold. It had been exacerbated by the smoke from the fire that devastated Windsor Castle and it gave added poignancy to a speech she made at Guildhall marking her 40 years on the throne.
“Nineteen ninety-two is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure,” she said. “In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an annus horribilis.”
It had, indeed, been a terrible year for the royal family: as well as the fire, the marriages of the Queen’s three eldest children were all in the process of collapse. Perhaps more importantly the speech marked a turning point in the royal family’s relationship with the British people. Bleak in both content and delivery, with its talk of how no institution could expect to be free from scrutiny, the speech was either an appeal for forbearance and understanding or an act of penitence.
It was also a heavy hint of what was to come only two days later. In the Commons, John Major, the prime minister, announced that the following year the Queen and the Prince of Wales would start paying tax on their private income, and that £900,000 of Civil List payments to other members of the royal family would come to an end.
Of the three marriage breakdowns, at least the Queen knew one was coming: the divorce of Princess Anne and Mark Phillips, who had been separated for some years, was finalised in April. The tabloids were rarely short of tittle-tattle from the other two. In January, photographs were published of the Duchess of York on holiday with her Texan friend Steve Wyatt. Six days later the duke and duchess decided to separate.
The Prince and Princess of Wales, meanwhile, were conducting a highly public marital war. However, nothing prepared people for the shock of the serialisation in The Sunday Times in June of Andrew Morton’s book Diana: Her True Story.
Readers learnt how Diana had deliberately thrown herself down the stairs at Sandringham, and had even slashed her wrists with a razor blade. Her bulimia and depression were charted in devastating detail. While Diana was portrayed as vulnerable and unable to cope, Charles was castigated for his lack of understanding and his relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles.
The Queen was both furious and deeply troubled by it all. In her biography of the Queen, Sarah Bradford painted a vivid picture of the awkward atmosphere at Royal Ascot that year, with Prince Philip refusing to talk to Diana and the Queen in “a pretty bad temper”, according to one of her guests.
The scandals kept on coming. In August, the Daily Mirror published a picture of the Duchess of York topless by a pool as her friend and so-called financial adviser, John Bryan, kissed her toes. The Sun published the transcript of a telephone conversation between Diana and James Gilbey, in which he called her “Squidgy” and she described her marriage as “torture”. Another recording surfaced in November, courtesy of The Sun. This time it was the Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker Bowles, and featured the prince uttering such toe-curling endearments as “Your great achievement is to love me.”
Discontent about the royals’ tax affairs rumbled on. Behind the scenes, moves were already afoot to address the tax question. In public, however, it looked as if the royal family was on the back foot, with both Labour and Tory MPs calling for reform.
Then, on November 20, fire broke out at Windsor Castle after a restorer’s lamp set a curtain alight. St George’s Hall suffered extensive damage, along with the state dining room and three drawing rooms. Although there was sympathy for the royals, in a woeful misreading of the public mood, the heritage secretary Peter Brooke announced that as the castle was uninsured, the government would foot the repair bill, estimated at £20 million–£40 million. The restoration was later paid for without any recourse to public funds.
On December 9 came the announcement of the separation of the Prince and Princess of Wales. Days later, The Sun published the text of the Queen’s Christmas broadcast before it went out. The Queen successfully sued for breach of copyright. It would take time, however, before the royal family’s standing recovered.
Fire swept through Windsor Castle in November 1992.
The Queen returned to London to face her people yesterday, and they left her in no doubt that she was welcome.
At two public appearances she looked at times red-eyed and only just within the bounds of composure, at times astonished at the mountains of flowers and the size of the crowds and, in brief flashes of smile, relieved that any mild criticism of the Crown displaying insufficient public mourning seemed to have been forgiven by her presence.
As the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh arrived from Balmoral at the Buckingham Palace gates, they got out of the car to look at the flowers and tributes to her late former daughter-in-law draped along the entire frontage. Turning to her husband, she shook her head as she pointed to the carpet of floral tributes. She saw too a poignant reminder of recent disquiet: a small Union Flag at half-mast left by one of the many thousands who had come to grieve.
Slowly the Queen walked along the lines of flowers, occasionally leaning down to read a message, pointing out a child’s toy or a memorable photograph to Prince Philip.
She looked moved by the unforeseen and unprecedented expression of public grief. For several moments the royal couple stood together, heads bowed, lost in thought at the thousands of handwritten tributes, many of which were critical of their monarch.
As the crowd realised the Queen was walking among the flowers, they broke into applause. She turned for a second, smiled then returned to gaze on the endless succession of simple tributes. She told one woman: “I never realised there had been so many flowers left; it is remarkable.”
Dressed in black with a simple hat and three strings of pearls, the Queen spent ten minutes walking back and forth before the crowd, with bouquets pressed into her hands and those of the Duke at almost every step.
Before she retired back into the palace she turned to look down The Mall, by now a sea of faces almost as far as she could see. However much her advisers had briefed her on the events and the mood in London, she was patently unprepared for the sheer size of the public expressions of sympathy for the Princess.
The story was the same at St. James’s Palace, where the Queen and the Duke spent 15 minutes privately in the Chapel Royal, where the body of the Princess lies before the altar under Holbein’s painted ceiling commemorating Henry VIII’s brief marriage to Anne of Cleves. As she emerged from the palace, a waiting crowd of thousands broke into applause. Briefly, the Queen smiled, and went straight to another spontaneous display of flowers on the pavement. She made for the head of the queue, still hundreds of yards long, that for five days has shuffled towards the books of condolence.
Fred Cultworthy, 44, pressed a single rose in her hand. “I bought it for Diana, but I gave it to the Queen so that she would not think everybody thought the same way as some newspapers,” he said.
Laura Trant, 15, said: “We told her how sorry we were, and we told her to look after the boys. She said ‘I will’. She couldn’t believe how hard it was for them because they were so young. Her mouth was quivering and her eyes were tearful.”
As the Queen walked the first hundred yards of the queue, many others expressed their feelings about the young princes. She told one woman: “The boys are the important thing.”
Beryl Holliday, 54, was glad to have spoken to the Queen. “Everybody here thinks it was worth the wait. I hope she has listened to the people.”
The Times, September 6, 1997
Princess Diana’s family watch the hearse depart at her funeral on September 6, 1997.
The moment during her reign when the Queen’s ability to reinvent the monarchy for the modern age was demonstrated most cleverly came when she starred as a Bond gi...
