A Biography That Captures the ‘Sheer Oddity’ of Being Queen
When history remembers Queen Elizabeth II, it reliably hits the same beats. An upper-class English countrywoman happiest among her horses and corgis, she inherited a title that put her at a remove from everyone she met. She became professionally inscrutable; omnipresent and yet impersonal. She was, many accounts would agree, a difficult person to know, even among those close to her. But what we don’t talk about nearly enough is the effect all that stoicism had on others. Face-to-face with the queen, her subjects became their strangest selves, yammering on about dachshunds’ sleeping habits or the history of garden vegetables.
As the satirist and critic Craig Brown tells it in his new biography, A Voyage Around the Queen, the late monarch existed in a world scrubbed and polished to its highest possible sheen, populated by people who seemed always in the middle of a meltdown. Cataloging these fumbling exchanges is where Brown’s 672-page tome — out now from Farrar, Straus and Giroux — really shines. See: The Beatles, while accepting their MBEs, answering their monarch’s questions with a series of random white lies, then bursting into a Vaudeville tune. Or the writer Hilary Mantel making accidental eye contact with the queen at a palace literary reception and flinging herself behind a couch to hide on the floor.
Not even people who were famous themselves could escape her effect. It must have been a weird way to live, and it makes Brown’s central theory — that the queen functioned almost as a mirror, in which “those who look at her are prone to see their own outlook reflected back” — funnier to think about. Brown suggests that, in popular consciousness, the queen’s overwhelming familiarity made her more symbol than sentient human, giving people ample room for projection. And truly, during her 96 years, she was everywhere: According to estimates quoted in Brown’s book, the queen met some 4 million people in her lifetime. She may have figured in a third of Brits’ dreams.
That ubiquity made her an ideal subject for Brown, who has authored award-winning biographies of Princess Margaret and, more recently, the Beatles. Coming off of that effort, he sought a subject “who was universal and inhabited the national psyche in the way the Beatles did,” and whose life suited his “mosaic technique” of biography: “not strictly chronological, lots of small chapters, lots of chapters about people’s idea of the person,” he explains. “Certainly about the only real candidate was the queen.” To bring her to life, he read what seems (based on his 15-page source list) like every book ever written about the royal family, along with diaries, letters, news reports, and first-person accounts; he also conducted his own interviews. From all of this, he pasted together previously unmined details into a prismatic collage of personality. “I didn’t want it to be a straight biography,” he says. “It’s as much about her effect on the rest of the world and on individuals as it is about her.”
The queen was so famous for so long, and there is a huge wealth of information about her. How do you decide what belongs in the book?
Why most books about the queen and the royal family are so unbelievably boring is because they put everything in. They put what she was wearing when she visited Canada in 1953, on every day, or the name of every mayor that she met. Part of the art of writing is to cut out what is boring, and obviously with the queen, an immense amount of her life was boring. It was almost her job to both be bored and appear interested — in some way, to be boring. She wasn’t allowed to say anything controversial. Her job was just being uncontroversial in a way.
She was probably the most famous person for longer than anyone in history, and yet there was this paradox that she didn’t put herself about. She never gave an interview in her life: She was unknowable slightly because of this reserve and because everyone knew her face. But she divorced herself as a symbol from herself as a character, and she didn’t muddle the two. She never made the mistake of thinking she was loved for herself, or that she had any particular talent other than being queen. I’m not saying she was without talents, but she didn’t become famous as a result of being a good actress or being a great captain of industry.
Well, speaking of queen’s talents, there were two that jumped out at me from reading your book. One is that she was sort of a shrewd strategist. I’m thinking about the episode with the stamps, and all of her quiet maneuvering. And then there was the incident with her horse trainer. Imagining her as conniving will be at odds with the picture a lot of people will have in their brains. She came to embody the kindly grandma by the end. Very responsible and reserved. Are there other aspects of the queen’s personality that pop culture has gotten, if not quite wrong, then not quite right?
She was certainly shrewd and she could be really fierce, almost solely in guarding the idea of the monarchy. Of course, the thing with her racing trainer, Dick Hern, that was a surprise. It does seem out of character, but given that she did it, I think she just went too far.
Because of her age at the end, I think that people did underestimate what Graham Greene once called, talking about writers, the sliver of ice in her heart. Maybe there’s a sliver of ice in everyone’s heart. Actually, someone who really knew the royal family sent me an email today, and — hold on, I’ll just get it, because it’s a rather good expression. I better not say who it is, but he just read my book and he’s very much a skeptic. He said, I think you were spot-on in terms of her character. Crashing bore, philistine, and subtle bully combined with a wholly suitable person for the role, and a well-meaning woman in amongst it all. Now that’s kind of interesting!
But there might be a lesson to be had in just how one regards other people. Everyone is made up of so many different aspects. Doing this voyage around the queen and all these people looking at her from different angles, maybe that’s as close as you ever get to anybody. Obviously, if someone is a serial killer or a brilliant artist or something like that, then they have some real essence to them that you can single out. But with someone like the queen, maybe that’s as close as you can get: just lots and lots of other people’s impressions.
Speaking of: The most exciting thing I learned from your book was that the queen had a very special talent for making people behave like absolute freaks simply by existing.
Virtually everyone who met her either went completely silent or just spoke nonsense. A friend of mine who was invited to one of her regular, intimate lunches for eminent people was told it would be wise to go to the loo in advance because some people had “accidents” upon meeting her. And the novelist Kingsley Amis, who was this very sort of bluff, tough, right-wing novelist, he was so terrified of farting in front of the queen that he took a course of Imodium. If she was in the theater, the audience would all be looking at her and then they wouldn’t laugh at a comedian until they’d noticed whether she had laughed first. Unknowingly, unwittingly, she produced madness in everyone.
She really sucked the air out of a room!
Yes! Which wasn’t her fault. It was just a product of her position in national life. There’s a description of Marilyn Monroe being so nervous to meet her. They were virtually the same age, but the queen had noticed that she had licked all her lipstick off in her nervousness. Prince Harry, in his slightly weird memoir, says that he couldn’t completely communicate with her because of her position, so you think that if even her grandchild was affected by the fact that she’s queen, it must’ve applied to everyone, really.
Do you get the sense that she was aware of her effect on people? At some point you write that she must have thought all of her subjects were deranged.
Her subjects and beyond. There’s film of her talking to Ronald and Nancy Reagan on the royal yacht Britannia, and you can see that it’s the president of the United States of America in awe of her rather than the other way round, and Nancy fussing and talking a little overexcitedly. It wasn’t helped by protocol: The queen would ask the questions and whoever she was talking to would answer, but you weren’t meant to ask the queen a question. It meant that every conversation wasn’t really a conversation.
But I think she must’ve been aware. She must’ve seen television and other people talking to each other and realized you could get by. One of the points of the book, one of the things I thought other biographies hadn’t homed in on, was just the sheer oddity of being the queen, and especially being a comparatively normal kind of character locked in the position of being queen. This idea that she thought the natural smell of the world was fresh paint, because everything had been doctored before she came to visit. But I think she would’ve known that. Over the course of her 96 years, she would’ve realized that other people could enter a town without having lines of people waving flags and cheering.
The fresh-paint observation — I hadn’t thought about it that way before, but it’s not just her; it’s the queen mother going to visit a hospital or something, and they repave the road, but as soon as she’s come and gone, they tear up the pavement.
Yes, it’s mad. Amazing, amazing. Queen Victoria, who was also born royal, throughout her life she never once, before sitting down, looked back to see if there was a chair there, because there would always be some flunky placing the chair. It’s a very peculiar thing to be a senior member of the royal family.
Reading these interactions, it helped me to understand or maybe believe that I’m understanding the royals a little better. Maybe a person can’t help but to be a little entitled, or out of touch, when so many of the encounters they have with the real world are distorted.
I remember perhaps the only funny thing Michael Douglas ever said, that being famous is like having dementia; everyone knows who you are but you don’t know who anyone else is. And that could be magnified being the queen, but I think she didn’t have a sense of entitlement like the younger royals. She’d been brought up to it from an early age, and by the time she was 10, she knew she was going to be queen. I think it was just life to her. She just did what she saw as her duty, and obviously there were great benefits to being queen, but she kept her head down.
There were some topics that I was surprised to see you not touch on as much, the queen’s relationship with Prince Andrew being one. Do you have any particular reason for leaving that out?
My natural inclination is toward kitsch and vulgarity. If that’s your inclination, then obviously Andrew and Fergie are the perfect landing spot. So I might have bent over too far the other way trying to restrain myself from always going on about them. I was always thinking of ways to tackle familiar subjects from another angle, so with Andrew, I thought it was kind of funny to have that chapter with a photograph of him as a baby and the family all looking down at him, and just leave it to the imagination. The papers rejoicing about the birth of this new baby, this love fest about the baby, and then leaving it to the reader to realize what’s going to happen.
I tried to keep on the straight and narrow about the queen, and obviously her relationship with her children is part of her life, but I didn’t want to get too sidetracked by either Andrew or Fergie or even Charles. But I wasn’t covering up anything, I don’t think. Still, it is interesting. I’d done an earlier book about Princess Margaret, who was much more difficult and more entitled, but I hardly mentioned her children at all and yet, quite clearly, her children are much more productive human beings, much less entitled than the queen’s. It’s funny that, especially Andrew, there’s a sort of coarseness to him. He’s sort of uncouth. You can’t quite see where that comes from. But I suppose everyone is their own person in the end.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length.
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