38656356325923

never with good humour.’ He was prepared to answer questions about the Queen’s
public engagements but was reluctant to trespass on what he conceived to be her
private life, telling the Press Council that in his view the Queen was ‘entitled to expect
that her family will attain the privacy at home which all other families are entitled to
enjoy’. The Press Council replied that ‘the private lives of public men and women,
especially royal persons, have always been the subject of natural curiosity. That is one
of the consequences of fame or eminence or sincere national affection. Everything
therefore that touches the Crown is of public interest and concern.’ 2 This was the view
that was ultimately to prevail, although some people at court, not least Elizabeth
herself, might feel in the later years of her reign that the pendulum has swung too far
away from Commander Colville’s ‘right to silence’ as far as the private life of the royal
family was concerned.
Not all the courtiers whom Elizabeth inherited from her father were elderly or even
middle-aged. Patrick, 7th Baron Plunket, whom she had known since childhood, was
only three years older than she was. His family had enjoyed a special relationship with
her family; his parents, Terence ‘Teddy’ and Dorothé, had been close friends of her
mother and father when they were still the Yorks. Terence Plunket, the 6th Baron, had
been a handsome, amusing Anglo-Irish aristocrat, a good raconteur and a talented
portraitist who specialized in caricatures of his friends; Dorothé, his wife, was half-
American, the daughter of Cecil B. de Mille’s leading lady, Fannie Ward, and ‘Diamond
Joe’ Lewis, who had made a fortune (and lost most of it) in South Africa with Solly Joel
and ‘Babe’ Barnato. The Plunkets were members of the international set; they were on
their way in a private plane to a party to be given for them by William Randolph
Hearst in California in the spring of 1938 when the plane crashed, killing them both.
Patrick, the eldest of three brothers, was just fifteen, but he was old enough, after Eton
and Cambridge, to enlist in the Irish Guards and pick up a wound in the 1939–45 war.
King George VI had appointed him an equerry and the Queen made him her Deputy
Master of the Household in 1954. Patrick Plunket was not at all ‘tweedy’; like his
parents, he was amusing and had taste and a gift for entertaining. He loved
masterminding the grand occasions – the Queen’s banquets and state receptions, the
house-parties for Ascot week at Windsor – and with a wide circle of friends outside the
hunting, shooting and racing people Elizabeth had been used to, he livened up the guest
list. Rooms would be decorated with pyramids of delphinium spires or entire syringa
trees, and the tables with Georgian silver he had hunted out of the strongrooms. Plunket
was a connoisseur with a collector’s eye for paintings and furniture; he was a trustee of
the Wallace Collection and the National Art Collections Fund and played an important
advisory role in transforming the bomb-damaged Royal Chapel (in which Elizabeth had
been christened) into the Queen’s Gallery, opened in 1962 to the public for exhibitions
of works of art from the royal collections. Patrick Plunket was a genuine friend of
Elizabeth’s, an antidote to the horsey, ‘tweedy’ friends like the Rupert Nevills, who
encouraged her more philistine and anti-intellectual tendencies.
The structure and titles of the officers and officials of Elizabeth’s court remained the