Dutiful and modest – a superb portrait of Her Majesty
Free of vanity, she agreed with Benn on the removal of her head from stamps
Queen Mary rebuked her once that ‘vulgar enjoyment of crowds smacked of actresses’
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One small episode in the Queen’s life, sadly undramatised by The Crown, says something very suggestive about her character. It occurred in 1965 when Tony Benn, then postmaster general, persuaded her to agree that her head should be removed from ceremonial stamps. Harold Wilson, telling Benn that he was reversing the decision, observed: “She is a nice woman and… [said] yes when she didn’t really mean it.”
How many other monarchs can you think of – past, present, or likely to come in the near-future – who would agree to such an idea? We all know the Queen is no pushover – she fights like a tigress when it comes to the Commonwealth – but the fact that she was prepared to go along with Benn suggests a lack of vanity and an eagerness to do the right thing, however disagreeable, that must be almost unique among crowned heads.
Wilson put his finger on it: she is a nice woman. This is not good news for her biographers, however: nice people rarely make for compelling books. The Queen is a remarkable person but not an especially interesting one (in contrast, say, to Prince Charles, who is the other way around, or the Duke of Edinburgh, who was both).
Matthew Dennison, whose previous books include lives of Queen Victoria and her daughter Princess Beatrice, avoids two of the paths that might tempt the biographer of such a monarch. He hasn’t gone for the bland hagiography that would have been easy to rush off and would have pleased many of the people who are going to buy this new life of the Queen. Nor has he made her into a peg on which to hang set-pieces and character sketches of her largerthan-life family members and acquaintances, like the colourless protagonists of 18th- or 19th-century novels. Instead the focus is unwaveringly on the Queen – how events shape her and how she shapes events – from cradle to 95th year.
Inevitably, the early life of such a long-lived person seems bewilderingly remote: she grew up in a house in which a “boy scout operated the telephones”, and any reference to the “mixed heritage” of this royal baby was a result of her mother’s being a commoner (born a mere Lady, rather than an HRH).
Elizabeth grew up to be shy (partly because she was aware she lacked her mother’s ostentatious star quality) and was taught to be dutiful and modest. When she told her grandmother, Queen Mary, that they couldn’t leave a concert early because they would disappoint “all the people who’ll be waiting to see us outside”, she was rebuked: “Vulgar enjoyment of crowds smacked of actresses.”
One is tempted to describe this as a Freudian biography, in that Dennison clearly thinks the Queen’s childhood is worth describing in immense detail. One rapidly gets rather weary of the endless extracts from adoring press reports about the young princess’s trips to the beach and so on, not least because Dennison clearly cannot bear the thought of conveying approval of their sycophantic tone, and insists on describing them as “treacly” or “saccharine” long after we’ve got the message.
Out of 500 pages (excluding notes), by the time we get to page 100 Elizabeth is only 10 and we’ve just buried George V. George VI hangs on until page 232, and we’re already at the halfway point when we get to the Coronation. Thereafter Dennison takes the actual reign at a hell of a lick. Anyone who wants a rapid, lucid, well-organised dash through the Queen’s seven decades on the throne couldn’t do better, but one does wonder why the tour through her first 25 years wasn’t conducted at a similar pace.
One also regrets some omissions that might not have mattered in a slim volume, but are striking in their absence from a book this hefty. Hardly anybody apart from the Queen is given the space to come to life: even Philip and Margaret, who would be memorable enough even as twodimensional sketches, are shadowy figures. And there is no time to dwell on events: you’re told, say, that Prince
Edward’s unfondly remembered TV project It’s a Royal Knockout was a famous disaster in 1987, but you’re not given the cringey pleasure of being told why in any detail. There’s not really time for a sense of the Queen’s
day-to-day life: no discussion of whether, as reported, she really stores her cornflakes in Tupperware boxes, from motives of thrift. Some valuable insights into her character are omitted: the moment at the LSE in 2008, for example, when she summed up what the whole country had been thinking and asked why no financial experts had seen the credit crunch coming.
Dennison does not gloss over the Queen’s faults – especially her hands-off parenting of her first two children, and overindulgence of her third – but he is clearly no republican (as evidenced by his intemperate reference, when discussing the television coverage of Diana’s death, to “hatchet-faced women plucked from the crowd by presenters, who disgracefully berated their monarch”). He tries to show fairly how her weaknesses are the flipside of her strengths; for example, of her decision to delay visiting the site of the Aberfan tragedy, and her refusal to put her name to the toys she sent there from
Andrew and Edward’s nursery, he writes: “Her reaction suggests an aversion to easy gestures […] and genuine humility; it points to a lack of understanding of the succour offered by her presence.”
One has to say, though, that for most of her subjects the Queen doesn’t have to be present for us to feel that sense of succour; just the knowledge of her existence is deeply comforting. Why that should be is very hard to explain and will be lost once the last memories of her fade: I doubt in 100 years people will be as fascinated by her as we are by her mercurial great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria. Reading this enjoyable book will give them all the facts, but I don’t think it will take them to the heart of why we cherish her so.
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