The Queen, with her quiet dignity, has never walked out on anything

ONCE, when she was a little girl, Princess Elizabeth was out on some London excursion with her grandmother, the majestical Queen Mary. Sensing, perhaps, that the child was flagging, the consort of George V asked if she wanted to go home.

‘Oh, no, Granny,’ lisped the child, ‘think of all the people who will be waiting outside to see us.’

The matriarch stiffened. Then she commanded a servant to take the Princess back to her Piccadilly residence at once – and by the back door. She wanted no leading lady spirit in her granddaughter, like some Hollywood idol simpering about ‘my public’.

We do not know what the Queen really thinks about the deplorable choices of her grandson and his wife last week. We may indeed never know. The personal insult to a 93-year-old grandmother will sting enough, but the affront to the values by which she has lived her life will be sorer still.

Elizabeth II has never sought to be the height of fashion; to be the intimate of unimaginably rich ‘celebs’; to opine preachily on every hot topic of the day; to posture as an ‘influencer’ or whizz about everywhere by private jet.

She much prefers to travel by train; she keeps her views to herself; she attends church weekly, with a crisp £10 note for the collection; and once, in childhood, she said she would love to be a woman living in the country ‘with lots of horses and dogs’.

Of course, she has to live in a certain style, making the regular seasonal round of five different residences – we forget too readily she spends a quarter of her year in Scotland – but, when the Royal Yacht Britannia was finally opened as a static tourist attraction, most were startled by the gentle 1950s modesty of the Queen’s stateroom.

And when, some years later, an undercover reporter worked for a week or two as a Buckingham Palace footman, we were all tickled by photo graphs of the Sovereign’s breakfast table – with the little transistor radio and assorted cereals in sensible Tupperware.

Once, on some engagement, some showboating man extravagantly threw his jacket over a puddle in the Queen’s path. She stared – and stepped carefully around it.

From her assiduous reading, morning and night, of the latest State papers, to the dry and neutral tone in which she gives her Government’s speech at the State Opening of Parliament, this is a woman who is unconsciously but instinctively a servant – and one who is no stranger to sorrow.

The Queen is haunted by much: for example, the early death of her father. At the time of her marriage in November 1947, Princess Elizabeth could reasonably have expected to enjoy many more years before acceding to the throne. Had George VI lived as long as his mother (Queen Mary, in fact, survived him) that would not have been until 1981.

Disdain

But the Princess was still only 25, in February 1952, when his sudden death catapulted her into the monarchy, with limited confidence, education or life experience and surrounded by a set of overbearing courtiers who, in particular, made no secret of their disdain for her husband.

She is, too, haunted by the abdication. In the rear-view mirror her parents are justly remembered with vast respect for their doughty service through the bleak years of the Second World War.

We forget how badly shaken the Crown was by the petulant flight of Edward VIII. We forget how republican sentiment surged and how illsuited for the throne George VI (of low intelligence, little confidence and scant charisma) appeared in contrast to his suave and golden big brother – who was not only still alive, as he lamented, but ‘very much so’.

Indeed, the Duke of Windsor would survive until 1972 and his brittle, rasping widow until 1986, leading lives of increasingly tawdry vapidity – latterly reduced to attending parties of dreadful people in exchange for money, the Duke never forgiven for his desertion of his people and his throne.

But the Queen – now only two years from an incredible Platinum Jubilee – has also had to contend with a tide of social change. The Britain of 1952 was one where a housewife still donned hat and gloves to go shopping, when church attendance was widespread and when university students wore suits and ties.

We must not glamorise that distant era. It had many dark aspects, from thoughtless racism to brutal school punishments. But it prized order, deference, good manners, decency, respect for older people and tradition.

It has been swept away in an anarchy of increasing intolerance and vulgarity, and the Queen has had to preside over it all, whatever she may privately think, as a still steady centre to whom we instinctively turn for reassurance – head of state, yes, but head of the nation too.

And we should not underestimate, either, the burden of old age. You do not have to be much over 50 to know something of creaking joints and chronic pain, the loss of stamina and declining eyesight. Past 90, you will have outlived most of your contemporaries and your dearest friends.

The Queen is still putting in a full-time job at an age when everyone else retired decades ago.

Allowances are increasingly made. Her heirs now preside at most investitures; the now seldom ventures abroad, is unlikely again to cross the Atlantic or visit Australia.

She may well be in her winter, but of all our monarchs surely she most deserved serenity and peace in her final years. Instead, and in a matter of months, she has been grievously let down by two members of her immediate family and to whom she had shown nothing but love, generosity and forbearance – the latter, indeed, perhaps to a fault.

There has been the usual nonsense in the past week, and from the usual suspects, about the need to ‘trim back’ and ‘scale down’ the Royal Family. This quite ignores the reality that the further branches – the Gloucesters and the Kents and the Snowdens – have led blameless and admirable lives.

Goodwill

The problems have always been at the centre and, with remarkable regularity, about the second-in-line – the late and tragic Princess Margaret; the gormless Duke of York and now, of course, Harry and Meghan.

In the fate of her late and, in her final decades, hideously unpopular sister, the Queen has helplessly beheld how, once even the most magnetic royal personality has comprehensively alienated public goodwill, it can never be recovered.

It is unlikely that she was privately enthusiastic about marriage to an American starlet who nonchalantly walked out on her first husband, has become wholly estranged from her father, will tolerate nothing but the most fawning press coverage and – as was evident last Wednesday – likes to schedule all announcements for the convenience of US television news.

The Queen has never walked out on anything, and is acutely aware that she is the last sacerdotal monarch on earth – that she was not just crowned, but anointed to a sacred trust.

And she will reign, in uncomplaining humility and in wellkept conscience, until she closes her eyes in death, even as her whining grandson puts himself out of our misery.