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occasion, I’m told.’
Elizabeth had one free evening after a reception in Duisburg. To the Ambassador’s
surprise and delight when he said to her how much she would be looking forward to a
quiet private evening, she said, ‘Yes, but don’t you think it would be nice to invite our
German suite who have been so good to us?’ ‘I’m sure they’d love it,’ the Ambassador
replied, ‘but I don’t see that there’s any obligation on your part to do so.’ ‘No, no,’ she
said. ‘I’d like to do that.…’ At Cologne Cathedral the elderly Cardinal spoke not a word
of English, but when he received the Queen he managed to deliver a speech of about
five minutes ‘in beautiful English’ which he had learned by heart. When the Ambassador
told the Queen this, she said, ‘it was one of the nicest speeches that had ever been done
in her honour’. Finally, in Hamburg, the great port which had once been part of the
democratic Hanseatic League, there was a delicate question of her reception at the town
hall, which had an enormous staircase. There was a tradition that even in the days of
the Empire, the Mayor of Hamburg would stand at the top of the stairs and would never
descend to greet the Emperor. There was considerable discussion about this and finally
the Mayor said, ‘I cannot go down to greet even the Queen of England but I will go
down to greet a lady.’
Meanwhile, a series of events had led to the resignation of Macmillan. ‘Supermac’, as
cartoonists had come to depict him in the earlier years of his premiership, had been
losing his grip on the public and the party, a loss of touch emphasized by his panicky
and ruthless sacking on 12/13 July 1962 of his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Selwyn
Lloyd, and other Cabinet colleagues, including the Lord Chancellor, Lord Kilmuir, and
David Eccles, the Minister of Education, an episode that has gone down to history as
‘The Night of the Long Knives’. ‘Greater love hath no man’, commented the Liberal
politician, Jeremy Thorpe, ‘than to lay down his friends for his life.’ The sacked
Ministers had made no secret of their dismay in their valedictory audiences with
Elizabeth, whose confidence in Macmillan and his reputation for ‘unflappability’ was
shaken. To soften the blow, in a break with precedent Elizabeth invited their wives to
accompany them to the Palace. Macmillan had acted quickly and brutally in order to
avoid protracted press speculation over the approaching weekend (a tactic he was to
repeat in October 1963 to secure the succession of the Earl of Home to the premiership).
Some of the unfortunate men, a royal aide remembers, ‘were on the verge of tears’. Lord
Kilmuir had had so little notice of his dismissal that he arrived in white tie and tails
complete with the Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order given him by the Queen
because he had been booked to address a meeting of the Dairy Society as Lord
Chancellor that night.
Later the same year, in October 1962, the Vassall case involving a homosexual civil
servant entrapped by the Russians into passing on defence secrets began the sex and spy
mania which was to characterize the next few years. Two journalists were subsequently
jailed in March 1963 for refusing to disclose their sources and the press declared war on
Macmillan. Then in June 1963 the Profumo scandal broke. John Profumo, the Secretary
of State for War, had been sleeping with a call girl, Christine Keeler, among whose other