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“Elizabeth
the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch” by Sally
Bedell Smith; Random House (684 pages, $30)
———
Sure, why
not. Let’s have yet another biography of Elizabeth II,
this one as she’s about to mark 60 years on the
throne.
So what
is new to justify Sally Bedell Smith’s massive
“Elizabeth the Queen”? What is left to uncover, and
what should be left uncovered and unknown in the life of
this exemplary lady whose predetermined existence of
regal obligation is yawningly unenviable, however
bejeweled the box it comes in?
Smith’s
book answers those questions with a double yes — yes,
there are mercifully things that cannot be known about
Elizabeth II, however hard the world tries (there is an
index entry for Elizabeth II, perspiration, lack of.)
And yes, there are things to be learned about Elizabeth
II as she changes and the monarchy changes with her.
Sometimes
it’s trivial; an American acquaintance says the queen
collects pepper grinders. And sometimes it’s about the
queen’s own words on her ancient calling in the 21st
century. With characteristic briskness, she told her
cousin Margaret Rhodes that her sanctified role means no
retirement until death, “unless I get Alzheimer’s or
have a stroke.”
Here is
where Smith breaks new ground, in the nature of the
cooperation she got. She interviewed by her reckoning
more than 200 people, 40 of whom wished to be anonymous.
That’s usually a red flag, but in Smith’s case, the
other 160 include the queen’s relatives and friends.
That suggests that some of the nameless 40 may be even
closer to the action.
Taken in
sum, along with the assistance the author got from what
she calls the “staff at Buckingham Palace” (Smith
must mean high-ranking figures in the royal household;
in palace speak, the staff are the servants, a word the
queen dislikes), it suggests that the “ring of
silence” around the queen, as one chapter describes
it, is thinking “legacy” on behalf of a queen who is
symbolically regal but personally modest, a woman
concerned about the image of her thousand-year-old
inheritance but who refuses to so much as pluck her
eyebrows.
Smith
acknowledges the pitfalls of an American writing about a
singularly British institution. The monarch’s role is
a complex one: head of state but not head of government,
reigning but not ruling. But perhaps because of that,
Smith is at pains to do a vivid job of making the
queen’s relationship with prime ministers and the
Commonwealth more comprehensible. As one example, during
Britain’s economic turmoil of 1973, the queen wanted
to end her Christmas speech with a bland “few
sentences” of concern. Prime Minister Edward Health
told her she could not. She watered down the remarks
even further, and again the prime minister said no. So
constitutionally, she could say nothing.
Biographies
such as this also depend on already published material.
The queen is 85, after all, and writers have been mining
her life, her family and her kingdom for decades. One
frustration in Smith’s book is the scantiness of
attribution within the chapters themselves. Footnotes
are probably a buzz kill for books such as this, but
time after time, quotes and information left me
wondering, “Where did she get that?” and having to
flip back and forth from the text to the notes, like
having to look up the answers for a particularly tricky
crossword puzzle.
Quoting
the loving words between newlyweds William and Kate,
riding in the state landau right after their wedding
last year, had me wondering where that came from. Back
to the notes, which credited the Mail on Sunday
newspaper, which must have employed a lip-reader —
unless one of the postilions on the coach was a plant,
as happened when another tabloid newspaper secretly got
a reporter hired on as a Buckingham Palace footman.
Smith is
even-handed about assessing the queen’s parenting
skills and her children’s marital turmoil, mostly
through the words of confidants such as the former
Archbishop of Canterbury and relatives. Over one dinner
with cousins, the queen said of the reckless doings of
Diana and Sarah, “Can you imagine having two
daughters-in-law like this?”
But Smith
clearly admires the queen’s stoicism and endurance.
The book’s endpaper photos of the queen all show her
smiling — except for four: the funeral of Earl
Mountbatten, killed by the IRA; a few moments after a
man in a crowd fired six shots at her (blanks, as it
turned out); at the decommissioning of the royal yacht
Britannia; and at her coronation, in the moments before
she was anointed with holy oil, a far more spiritual
ceremony for her than the crowning.
In her
last chapter, Smith opens up the “whither the
monarchy” speculative stakes. The subtitle of the book
is “The Life of a Modern Monarch,” and the thread
Smith follows is how the monarchy has had to embrace its
own Darwinian version of flexibility, never ahead of the
times but also trying not to be fatally far behind them.
“A
powerful source of the queen’s success as sovereign
has been her inscrutability and avoidance of
controversy,” something not the case with her son and
heir, Charles, whose thoughts are widely known, in part
through his own sometimes artlessly open interviews and
speeches. The queen’s concerns about the future of her
throne are grounded as much in what goes on inside her
family as about republicans pounding on the palace
gates.
It used
to be treason, punishable by death, to contemplate or
“compass” the death of the monarch. Now it’s a
matter for writers, and an international public
contemplating the queen’s diamond jubilee, and the
state of the realm thereafter. The celebration is in
June — plenty of time to swot up on your royal
knowledge, and Smith’s is a smart and satisfying book
to do it with.
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