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unspoken put-down – ‘she could chill you with her eyes’ – was once observed at a
reception at St James’s Palace, on being approached by Princess Michael, skilfully
revolving so that she always kept her back turned to her while appearing supremely
unconscious of her presence. The final embarrassment came with the revelation in 1985
that Marie-Christine’s father, Baron von Reibnitz, had been a member of the SS, a fact of
which the unfortunate Princess Michael (born in 1945) was herself unaware. Elizabeth,
who, not unnaturally, hates to be surprised by unpleasant news about her family by
reading it in the newspapers, was not amused.
Elizabeth, like her mother, has never been close to the Kents, with the exception of the
much-loved Princess Alexandra. She is loyal to the people she likes and, according to a
courtier, one of the few times she was seen to explode with rage was at the scathing
revelations by Alexandra’s daughter, Marina, about her parents in the tabloids. As a
boy, the young Duke of Kent used to stay with her and Philip at Birkhall when they were
first married and she attended his marriage in 1961 to Katharine Worsley, daughter of a
great Yorkshire landowner. She subsidizes the Kents’ public activities – among other
things they save her the necessity of presiding at sporting events not involving horses
such as the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Championships (a job inherited from Princess
Marina) and the Football Association Cup Final.
In the mid-1970s Elizabeth was not only the head of the family but almost its most
senior surviving member (apart from her mother and Princess Alice, Duchess of
Gloucester). Her maternal uncle, David Bowes-Lyon, had died at Birkhall in 1961. Her
father’s younger brother, the Duke of Gloucester, ‘Uncle Harry’, a simple, uncomplicated
soldier and farmer to whom public life had been anathema, suffered a series of strokes
which left him paralysed and unable to talk from 1968 until his death in 1974. Uncle
Harry was extremely forthright and often unconsciously funny. Although he had served
conscientiously as Governor-General of Australia, he did not enjoy the duties that came
as his birthright. ‘Public speaking did not come naturally to him,’ George V’s biographer,
Kenneth Rose, wrote of him, ‘nor had he a fund of amiable small-talk with which to
engage strangers. At the opening of a fruit and flower show he spoke only once. “What
a bloody big marrow,” he said, “glad I don’t have to eat it”, and at a performance of
Tosca during a state visit he watched as Maria Callas plunged over the battlements, then
his distinctive high-pitched voice rang round the opera house: “Well if she’s really dead,
we can all go home”’. 8 His eldest son, dashing, handsome and reckless Prince William of
Gloucester, was killed piloting his own plane in 1972.
The Duke of Windsor also died that year, 1972. In November 1971 a biopsy revealed
that the Duke was suffering from inoperable cancer of the throat; painful cobalt
treatment produced no result and through that winter his condition deteriorated so that
he could have died at any time. According to his doctor, Jean Thin, he was aware of this
but ‘it did not affect his general composure’ and ‘his courage and resignation compelled
general admiration’. He seemed concerned only that the Duchess should not be made too
anxious. He was largely confined to bed, with his favourite pug dog close by him for
company. Elizabeth saw him not long before he died. She was due to make an important