By keeping her nerve, the Queen did her duty
Themonarchy is far stronger thanks to the restraint Her Majesty showed while being roundly attacked
Diana, Princess of Wales had been dead just a few hours when signs of a sort of cultural revolution became apparent. The unprecedented, and at times unhinged, expression of public grief has been well-documented; less so another innovation, an increasingly ugly mood towards the Queen, as monarch and head of the Royal family, for her reaction to the death of her former daughter-in-law. Until then criticism of the Queen had been rare – when Lord Altrincham attacked her courtiers as “complacent” and her for sounding like “a priggish schoolgirl” in 1957, a man punched him. The judge who sentenced the assailant said he had struck a blow every man in England would have wished to have aimed.
The atmosphere in September 1997 was unsettlingly different. Some of the media – the part that regards the Royal family not as the dignified part of the British Constitution but a soap opera – had swiftly found the scapegoat many, in their unbridled emotion, instinctively sought: the Prince of Wales. But the belief that the whole House of Windsor had blood on its hands was encouraged, and the Queen was not exempt from it.
The first expressions of outrage came when she took her bereaved grandchildren, Princes William and Harry, to church that Sunday morning. Arbiters of public opinion felt it was terrible that these boys had been taken out when still palpably in shock at the death of their mother. It was deemed this must have been the Queen’s decision, and was viewed as heartless: the old Windsor notion of “business as usual”, by which the Royal family carries on whatever else happens, had overridden the boys’ feelings.
Thereafter the Queen was more readily attacked: for the Royal Standard not flying at half-mast over Buckingham Palace; and for not returning to London from Scotland, and participating in public mourning. She was also blamed for making the Princes walk behind their mother’s coffin to Westminster Abbey. And, once the initial furore passed, comment continued about how she bore a longerterm responsibility for the Waleses’ unsatisfactory marriage, the Princess’s unhappiness, and the divorce.
Years later, Lady Angela Oswald, a lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother and wife of her racing manager, gave an interview in which she confirmed how angry Queen Elizabeth had been at treatment of the Queen. She said the Princes wanted to attend church after their mother’s death: “If you are a Christian and your mother has been killed, it is a comfort going to church.” Lady Angela also attacked those who expected the Queen to “abandon her grandsons” and go to London as “selfish”.
The mood was not rational; it was manipulated for cynical reasons by the press and politicians. People failed to, or simply did not want to, understand that for all its public role the Royal family was still a family, and that the needs of two boys who had lost their mother were paramount. The Queen felt her responsibility was her son and grandsons, and not to grandstand in the tidal wave of emotion almost exclusively felt by those who had never met the late Princess.
There were failings, but they were understandable. An attempt was made to explain that the Royal Standard is never flown at half-mast. It is the monarch’s personal standard, and there is always a living monarch. Few were in a mood to listen. So the Union flag – at half-mast – flew over the Palace instead. Tony Blair, the prime minister, feared the public temper was so ugly that he advised the Queen to return to London earlier, to address the nation and do an ill-advised walkabout outside the Palace in the hope of calming the mood. It was unclear by then that some people really wanted to be calmed.
Before the funeral we heard that police would be saturating the route of the procession for fear of violence. It was an indication of how febrile things were. The Queen sat in Westminster Abbey and endured a hypocritical and offensive speech by Earl Spencer, who perhaps was beside himself with grief. She was increasingly overshadowed by Mr Blair, whose spin doctors effectively took charge of the Queen’s public relations. By the time of the Queen’s and the Duke of Edinburgh’s golden wedding in November 1997 Mr Blair seemed to dominate their anniversary walkabout. Morale had reached an ebb far lower than during the annus horribilis of 1992.
It is an irony probably lost on the Queen’s critics that in the ensuing 20 years, she has rebuilt respect and affection for the monarchy by sticking to the same dignified, restrained, dutiful and utterly decent manner for which she was so roundly attacked in September 1997. The near-hysterical mood has long passed, and possibly many who contributed to it realise that things went too far: and that the Queen was not culpable. The Duke of Cambridge has said that she went to extraordinary lengths to shield and protect her grandchildren from the events, even removing newspapers from Balmoral and ensuring the Princes stayed there for as long as
‘The Queen went to extraordinary lengths to shield and protect her grandchildren’