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tragedy when Patrick Plunket died,’ a family friend said, ‘because he made sure amusing
and interesting people were invited and the Queen listened to him. It was disastrous for
the whole of the household. It was disastrous for her as a friend.’ Many people later
thought that had he lived he might have helped avert some of the worst of the disasters
which were to overtake the family in the 1980s.
It was he who had organized the memorable party in Ascot Week 1970 to celebrate
the seventieth birthdays of the Queen Mother, the Duke of Gloucester and the Duke of
Beaufort. The initiative had come from him, not from the family, and it was he who had
put on the party for Prince Charles’s twenty-first birthday in 1969. With his premature
death the Court began to lapse into the traditional ways which belonged to previous
reigns. Even at Balmoral, where the royal family went into kilts and holiday mode,
women guests would find themselves having to change their clothes four times a day
from something to wear down for breakfast into sporting clothes for lunch and out with
the guns, back to change for tea and then into a long dress for dinner. (At Birkhall,
where the Queen Mother keeps up the state of former royal days, the women wear fullblown
evening dress and jewels for dinner even when it is only a small house-party.)
Even picnics and barbecues had a strict routine; Philip has a specially designed trailer to
hold the food – ‘woe betide anyone who did not put things back in the right place,’ a
guest said – and transgressions were received with much impatient shouting from Philip
and sometimes also from Elizabeth. Tradition was so strongly imprinted on Elizabeth’s
mind that at Balmoral she would cancel a house-party if there were no grouse on the
moors, regardless of the inconvenience to the guests who had planned their holidays
round it (and in some cases bought clothes for it). It never occurred to her that guests
could be invited if there were no shooting or that there might be other ways of spending
the day on Deeside. ‘She could have had such fun with other people who liked walking,
who liked fishing, who liked gardening, anything like that – but instead it would be,
“What are we going to do with them? There’s no shooting…”’
The loss of the charming, worldly-wise Patrick Plunket was a serious blow to
Elizabeth, depriving her of an important connection to the world outside her rather
blinkered, ultra-traditionalist horsy set and of a friend who might have guided her in her
dealings with the younger generation over the next decade. His death was followed by
the retirement in 1977 of an even wiser counsellor and old friend, Martin Charteris, her
Private Secretary since 1950, a man whom she knew to be utterly devoted to her and
who could be relied on to tell her what he thought necessary, even when it might not be
palatable to her. Charteris had known Elizabeth’s children all their lives and had a
rapport with them that his successors could not have.
Even before Charteris’s retirement, the traditional friction between the monarch and
the heir to the throne had begun to develop. Charles had completed the last part of his
parents’ preordained training plans by spending almost five years in the Navy. Before
that he had spent four months with the RAF at Cranwell qualifying as a jet pilot, which
he had thoroughly enjoyed. He had also made his first parachute jump, an unpleasant
and dangerous experience when the rope tangled round his feet immediately he leapt