A Brief History of the Private Life of Elizabeth II by Michael Paterson
Author:Michael Paterson [Paterson, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781780330747
Publisher: Constable & Robinson
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
MATURITY, 1960–1970
‘The English are getting bored with their monarchy.’
By the beginning of the 1960s the Queen had, as she had put it, ‘matured into’ her office. Her apprenticeship was long over, with her family growing up and her two children starting on their own life’s-journeys. Her habits were well established, the year divided between London, Windsor, Norfolk, Edinburgh and Aberdeenshire. She would be less newsworthy, for the press had had a decade in which to chronicle her tastes and her movements and was surely running out of subject matter. She and Philip were on the verge of middle life and, as he put it: ‘I would have thought that we’re entering the least interesting period of our kind of glamorous existence.’ The Royal Family, in other words, expected to be given more privacy because neither they nor their functions were any longer remarkable. Public opinion seemed to agree, and viewing-figures for the Christmas broadcast were declining. ‘The English,’ the now-infamous Malcolm Muggeridge told an American television interviewer, ‘are getting bored with their monarchy.’
Far from fading into obscurity, the Queen aroused widespread interest by having two more children, Andrew (1960) and Edward (1964). The media did not, however, have the field-day over these new arrivals that might have been expected. Her Majesty decided that this second pair of Royal children should have greater privacy than their older siblings – or she herself – had enjoyed. Access to them was deliberately not allowed to journalists and photographers during the earliest part of their lives. In the case of Prince Andrew, he was not seen by the public until a month after he was born, and this fuelled rumours that he was in some way abnormal.
The iconoclasm of the 1950s continued into the new decade. The Establishment – any institution that exercised power or owed its prestige to the past – was fair game for satirists. The most wounding blows to the established order were, however, self-inflicted. The discovery that two young upper-class diplomats, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, had been spying for the Soviet Union was made when both of them defected. A third man, Anthony Blunt, was Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, although his connection to the others would not be revealed until many years later. The Profumo scandal occurred in 1963. A government minister was caught in a sexual liaison that compromised national security, and then lied about his involvement in the House of Commons. Both of these incidents suggested the same thing – that the class which had traditionally assumed the leadership of the country, and justified its position on grounds of birth and education, was no longer to be trusted. As a setback to national confidence these things were worse even than Suez, for here the rot was shown to be within. It was even rumoured that the birth of the Queen’s youngest son, Prince Edward, was deliberately planned to counter this collective despair.
The monarchy, with its ostentatious public ceremonies, was the most highly visible aspect of the
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