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7
Sovereign Lady
‘I never imagined that anyone could grasp their destiny with such safe hands.’
Lord Charteris of Amisfield
Sitting in a bucking Dakota on the flight from Nanyuki to Entebbe, the first leg of her
journey home, the new Queen looked down on the white cone of Mount Kilimanjaro and
bush fires raging on the surrounding plains. Beside her, Martin Charteris was explaining
what she would have to expect when she got home, the protocol and the ritual to be
observed on the accession of a new sovereign. It was, after all, an occasion which he
had rehearsed privately ever since their Canadian journey. Elizabeth was wearing a
light-coloured cotton dress; all the mourning clothes with which nowadays she always
travelled in case of just such an eventuality as this were waiting for her at Entebbe,
having been flown up from Mombasa where her staff had already loaded everything on
to the Gothic. The last time Charteris had seen her before the news of the King’s death,
she had been ‘wearing blue jeans with windblown hair and looking wonderful’, talking
excitedly about rhinoceros. Now there was this composed young woman asking about
the Accession Council.
To the other people travelling with her on the plane she appeared calm, although
John Dean saw her get up once or twice and return to her seat looking as if she had
been crying. It was mid-afternoon when they arrived at Heathrow; as the engines died,
the Duke of Gloucester and the Mountbattens came aboard and with them Philip’s Extra
Equerry, Squadron Leader ‘Peter’ Beresford Horsley, with a note from Queen Mary for
the new Queen. On the tarmac Churchill was the first to greet Elizabeth, but seemed so
overcome with emotion that he could not speak. Instead of her own car from Clarence
House, one of the sepulchral black Rolls-Royces from the Palace stood waiting for her, a
reminder of her new status. When Elizabeth arrived at what had been her home,
Clarence House, she found Tommy Lascelles waiting with a bundle of papers. The first
document she signed as Queen was hardly a decorous one; it related to an army buggery
case.
Half an hour later Queen Mary came round in a limousine from nearby Marlborough
House. Queen Mary was an expert on the niceties of royal protocol and the deference
due to the head of the House of Windsor. Just as she had always made a point of
curtseying to her son, the King, on leaving the dining-room with the ladies at Balmoral