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audience, she’s got to be dressed up. So at 10 o’clock in the morning the Queen is
dressed in afternoon clothes.’ The unchanging image is in the Queen Mary tradition; in
this, as in so many other ways of being royal, ‘Grannie’ has been an influence. In the
same way, her much-criticized hairstyle never changes, partly because for continuity of
image she has to look the same for coins and stamps, partly because it has to be a style
which can be quickly adapted to hats for formal day occasions and a tiara for evening,
and partly because she likes to employ the same personnel. (She has used only three
hairdressers during her long reign; the last but one, Mr Charles Martyn, worked for her
for some thirty years before retiring, to be succeeded by Mr Ian Carmichael.) She is
intensely practical about clothes as about everything else – when she gave a state
banquet for the Reagans in California, Amies had designed a dress with huge bows on
the shoulders that looked quite inappropriate with her long earrings and tiara. ‘It was
entirely our fault,’ Amies said, but the Queen said, ‘Oh, don’t go on about it. I think it’s a
very pretty dress and I’m going to like it. Just take the bows off…’ However outspoken
Bobo might have been, Elizabeth’s manners with her dressmakers are always
‘impeccable’; she never says she doesn’t like something, just conveys by raising an
eyebrow that something is not quite right.
Although she is only 5ft 3in, she can wear with unselfconscious assurance jewellery
which on most women would look vulgar or overdone. She carries herself with a natural
dignity and she moves well. ‘The Queen has an aura,’ one of her royal relations said. Yet
despite being the owner of one of the most fabulous jewellery collections in the world,
she is not particularly interested in it and leaves the choice of what she wears to her
dresser. She often forgets what pieces she happens to have on – on one occasion
Margaret commented on a particularly pretty brooch her sister was wearing; ‘Oh, do
you think so?’ Elizabeth said vaguely. ‘I gave it to you,’ said the Queen Mother. The
image most people have of the Queen off-duty is of a countrywoman wearing the
inevitable headscarf tied under the chin in a style first fashionable in the early 1950s,
riding in hacking jacket and jodhpurs or walking her dogs wearing a mackintosh and
tweed or tartan skirt. On less strenuous occasions at home in the country the skirt would
appear with the timeless twinset and pearls.
Basically, as Altrincham had diagnosed, the atmosphere at Elizabeth II’s court was
almost indistinguishable from that under George VI, reflecting what Lacey called ‘the
confined perspectives of her upbringing’. Elizabeth had been brought up in a maledominated
world and was content for it to remain that way. She preferred dealing with
men; neither Elizabeth nor her mother or her sister makes any secret of their preference
for the company and conversation of men over women. Her work, the political side in
particular, meant that she came in contact almost exclusively with men. She was the
dominant figure in a man’s world; her position included being head of her armed forces.
As the daughter and granddaughter of serving officers, as, however briefly, an officer
herself, and as Colonel of the Grenadier Guards, she had a special understanding of that
world too. ‘The Palace ethos’, a royal observer said, ‘is that of a Guards regiment.’
None of the top household officials were women; women remained in their traditional