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and a pail underneath into which bile dripped through a tube. His doctor, Sir John
Richardson, waited outside, his ear to the door in case of an emergency, but Elizabeth
spoke in such a low voice as to be almost inaudible. The doctor noted that ‘there were in
fact tears in her eyes, and perhaps why I could not hear was because her voice was not
very steady’. ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked Macmillan, who noted that she was
very upset. ‘Well, I’m afraid I can’t go on,’ he replied. Then she said, ‘Have you any
advice to give me?’ Macmillan then read to her the prepared memorandum and handed
it over to her for preservation in the Royal Archives.
There was some concern at the Palace over the constitutional correctness of
Macmillan’s behaviour. ‘Macmillan was exercising a right he thought he had to advise
the Queen on his successor,’ one of the royal secretaries said, ‘but technically he hadn’t
because he had already resigned.’ Given the unrest in the Conservative Party over the
decision, of which the Palace was well aware, it was also by no means certain that
Home would be able to form a government. Precedents were consulted, notably George
V’s invitation to Baldwin after the retirement of Bonar Law in 1923; Elizabeth then
invited Home to the Palace and offered him the premiership. The fourteenth Earl of
Home became Prime Minister of Great Britain, renouncing his earldom to become plain
Sir Alec Douglas-Home under recently passed legislation. The resulting row even
exceeded the controversy when Macmillan had been appointed. In a three-page article
in the Spectator Iain Macleod claimed that the leadership had been settled by eight or
nine Tory grandees – the ‘magic circle’ – all but one of whom had gone to Eton, in
favour of one of their own and that Macmillan’s memorandum had left the Queen with
no option of choice. Enoch Powell made the same charge, that Macmillan had
deliberately deprived the Queen of the exercise of her principal prerogative. There was
some truth in this: Macmillan seems on the evidence of his published diaries to have
taken the initiative in getting Home to present himself as a candidate with a view to
having him as his successor. The Palace had made no attempt to take their own
independent soundings but asked Macmillan to do so, the main objective being to keep
the Queen from having to choose the leader of the Tory Party, which was certainly not
her constitutional duty. The British passion for official secrecy meant that the results of
the canvassing of the Conservative Party were not generally known. Macmillan argued
that he acted as he did to protect the Queen, shouldering the responsibility for himself,
but the end result left an unfortunate impression in the public eye. Either it appeared
that the Queen was bamboozled out of pity for the old wizard into accepting his
recommendation of an undoubted member of the grouse-moor set or that she acquiesced
because of her own personal ‘tweedy’ leanings and the fact that Home was an old
family friend of her mother’s, who, as Chamberlain’s Parliamentary Private Secretary,
had seen eye to eye with the Queen Mother over Munich. Neither explanation did the
image of the monarchy good in the new contemporary anti-establishment Britain.
It could certainly be argued that Home, an honourable man for whom no one who
knew him had anything but respect and liking, was perhaps the best compromise
candidate from the party unity point of view, but he carried with him too much old-