Before her death in September 2022, there used to be two failsafe approaches to writing biographies of Queen Elizabeth II. The first was straightforward fawning, in which the flattery was laid on with a trowel and what are rated character defects in most people were reinvented as positive virtues. The second was what might be called the republican convert strategy, in which a paid-up progressive, starting out from a baseline of mild skepticism, ends up charmed by his or her subject’s dutifulness and steely resolve — see, for example, Ben Pimlott’s The Queen (1996), which concludes with the queen, alone in her private quarters, her guests gone, with eyes “flashing with feline humor at the expense of those who had just paid her court.”
Given the constrictions of the form, it’s to the great credit of the British satirist Craig Brown that, in a crowded field, he has managed to devise a third way of examining the United Kingdom’s longest-reigning monarch: a kind of endless charivari in which the individual scenes — marriage, coronation, family life, triumphs, vicissitudes, and death — follow thick and fast and the testimony not only comes from loyal, and occasionally not so loyal, subjects summoned to her presence but also wings in from the obliquest of oblique angles. In fact, some of A Voyage Around the Queen’s most arresting chapters, such as a sketch of Jeannette Charles, who spent nearly half a century successfully impersonating her, are those in which she scarcely appears.
A Voyage has already become notorious for the revelation, confided to Brown by a nameless courtier, that the queen, when introduced to him on a state visit, found former President Donald Trump “rude.” There was also a suggestion that she considered his marriage to Melania to be “an arrangement,” i.e., contracted merely for promotional purposes. The book’s London launch party was enlivened by the news that Trump had denounced Brown as “a sleazebag” and claimed that, on the contrary, the queen regarded him as her favorite among the U.S. presidents she had met. In his speech, Brown promised that should the biography run to a second edition, he was prepared to change its subtitle to: “The Woman Who Adored Donald Trump.”
Several more presidents and their wives are featured here. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton remembers that “the Queen, seated next to Bill, wore a sparkling diamond tiara that caught the light as she nodded and laughed at Bill’s stories.” Former President Dwight Eisenhower can be found congratulating her in 1959 on the forthcoming birth of Prince Andrew. Jackie Kennedy, believing that the queen lacks style, is not impressed by her “dark-blue tulle dress and shoulder straps or her flat hair-style.” Nancy Reagan comes away from dinner and an overnight stay on the Royal Yacht Britannia in 1983 convinced that she and the queen are sisters under the skin. “It was not the Queen and first lady but two mothers and wives talking about their lives, mostly our children,” she recalled.
Brown has his doubts about the rapt sorority of the Royal Yacht. It was far more likely, he maintains, that Reagan made the running and the queen expressed a polite interest (“Oh really?”). His great theme, in investigating her almost legendary reticence (“Her Majesty’s a mighty nice girl, but she doesn’t have a lot to say,” as Paul McCartney put it on the Beatles’s White Album) is that she was not so much a painting, a symbol, or a conduit, but a mirror. With her inner world masked from public view and her conversation narrowly reactive, she became, as Brown puts it, “a human looking-glass. The light cast by fame bounced off her and back on to those she faced. To the optimist she became an optimist; to the pessimist a pessimist. To the insider, she appeared intimate, to the outsider distant; to the cynic prosaic.”
The idea that people saw in the queen what they wanted to see may well underlie the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s outlandish claim, made in 1956, that she was “the sort of young woman you’d be likely to meet walking along Gorky Street on a balmy summer afternoon.” On the other hand, it doesn’t explain the feelings of abject terror and confusion to which her prospective guests were sometimes reduced. Case-hardened republicans found themselves bowing in her presence. The unimpressionable were unexpectedly impressed. Marilyn Monroe, informed that she could expect to meet her in the line at a film premiere, was put in what an onlooker described as “a complete spin” and spent much of the day “curtsying all over the house and even trying to talk in an English accent.”
Footage survives of this brief interaction. Monroe tenses up and grows fidgety while the queen is still a dozen celebrities away, adjusts the straps of her dress, takes deep breaths, and sucks at her lips. As she curtsies, the queen darts a quick glance over the mound of exposed cleavage and smiles. A Voyage Around the Queen is full of this kind of neurotic comedy — another chapter, titled “A Brief History of Royal Rumors,” contains Lyndon LaRouche’s discovery from 2010 that the queen has been writing pseudonymous science fiction novels to distract the young and now wishes to have him assassinated for uncovering her secret. There is also a rip-roaring “Mimic’s guide,” which begins with the single word “Air,” defined as “Belonging to ourselves” and illustrated by the sentence, “Air femleh orphan gatheraind the tillyvishn.” (You may have to be British.)
It is also full of moments of real poignance. An occasional frostiness notwithstanding, the queen turns out to be a kindly, if immensely buttoned-up, woman, behind whose sometimes forbidding exterior lay great reservoirs of tact and fellow-feeling. Former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, with whom she was always supposed to enjoy chronically strained relations, left Buckingham Palace in tears after the audience in which she announced her departure from government, overwhelmed by the queen’s sympathy. Sensing that a medic who had worked in war-torn Syria was on the point of cracking up when she asked him about his experiences, the queen suggested that they go off and feed the dogs together. Nothing was said, but each knew what the other was about.
Craig Brown, one of Britain’s best-known satirists and humorous columnists, is, of course, wildly funny about the queen’s corgis, as he is about the queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, her daughter-in-law Sarah Ferguson, Harry and Meghan, and the tribe of hangers-on who surrounded her. The seriousness comes when he considers her effect on seven decades of British life. The closest I ever got to the queen was as a cheering schoolboy in the mid-1970s when she visited Norwich Cathedral. My father, alternatively, spent half a minute talking to her when, at the age of 80, he was awarded the MBE decoration. Afterward, he declared, without irony, that this fleeting glimpse of his sovereign had been the high point of his life. He was also mortified to discover that he had forgotten to bow and merely turned his back and stomped off. Here, you suspect, lies the topsoil in which some of the myths of modern nationhood take root and grow. Some of the realities, too.
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D.J. Taylor’s newest book, Who is Big Brother? A Reader’s Guide to George Orwell was published by Yale University Press.