One of the greatest privileges of my life is to have known Her Majesty the Queen, a little bit, and I would like to share some thoughts with you today why that was important to me.
Like everyone, my acquaintance with the Queen began a long time ago, at great distance. As a schoolboy in the 1960s, I made a scrapbook of the Royal family for one of my Cub Scout badges. Whilst visiting relatives in the town of Windsor in the same decade, my family saw the Queen in the passenger seat of a car driven by Princess Anne. My father will tell you to this day that the Queen was giving Princess Anne driving lessons, though I never knew why he thought so. Then in 1971, I was one of tens of thousands thronging the streets of my home town when the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh came to commemorate the founding of the city of York, 1900 years earlier in at 71 A.D. Such was the importance to me, at that time, of one glimpse of The Queen, that I still point out to my own children when we drive down Blossom Street in York the building where I stood, aged 11, to wave and cheer.
These are my memories, akin to the hundreds of thousands who have seen the Queen visit their school or their town or stood on The Mall in London for one of the major historic occasions. In some ways, I regret that I never did see the Queen on the Buckingham Palace balcony.
But I am supremely lucky that my acquaintance with Her Majesty and, indeed with other members of the Royal family, did not end there.
In 1982, I joined Her Majesty’s Diplomatic Service. And in 1985, I received the first of five letters of commission signed by Her Majesty. I have brought it to show you, on that easel there, exactly what the paperwork looks like when The Queen decides, in the words of the commission, that you are one of her “trusty and well-beloved” servants”. Later on, I lined the corridors of the Foreign Office in London with many of my colleagues when the Queen visited in celebration of a major anniversary of the establishment of the British foreign service. And later still I was one of the diplomats chosen to assist at a glittering, tiara be-sparkled diplomatic gathering when every Ambassador in London had the opportunity to present her/his family and her/his mission to the Queen.
I shared these experiences with very many of my colleagues in the Foreign Office and still these were essentially moments in the presence of the public face of Her Majesty. Where I count myself exceptionally lucky is that on three occasions, I was in one-to-one conversations with the Queen.
The first, in 1995, followed the Queen’s State Visit to South Africa, a landmark visit after the end of apartheid. At the end of the visit, I was presented with this medal by Her Majesty and the cufflinks I am wearing today. Then, in 2016, I was received by Her Majesty the Queen on my appointment as Her Majesty’s Ambassador to Algeria. And in 2019, just in time before Covid struck, Her Majesty receive me and Helen once more on my appointment as Her Majesty’s Ambassador to Romania.
Over the 70 tumultuous years of the Queen’s reign, many thousands of citizens from the United Kingdom, across the Commonwealth and from other countries from all walks of life, of all ages have also had such an experience, the memory of which they, and I, will never forget.
So what would be my impressions of the Queen in a private audience? First of all, she really was quite small, wearing bigger heels than I had expected. She was so strong, even as late as 2019, standing unaided for an audience with me and other Ambassadors that lasted 40 minutes. And it wasn’t the only audience she had held that morning – no, no, Bishops had been in the room immediately before us. Helen and I were so impressed by her strength and her presence, commenting that she bore none of the hallmarks of a woman of 93 years. Except that is, of course, in her conversation which was serious, brilliantly informed by her own relevant experiences but also humorous. For me, the thing that I will treasure was the discovery of Her Majesty’s sense of humour; that was what I least expected and will most remember. I hadn’t seen that in public. I’m so glad that we can all share in those brilliant TV moments with Daniel Craig at the London Olympics and the famous marmalade sandwich moment with Paddington Bear. Without those two sketches – who knew The Queen took part in amateur dramatics! I’m pleased it is no longer only the people who saw Her Majesty in private who can say with confidence what an irreverent and impish sense of humour she had.
I never had the sense in those three meetings that I should only speak when spoken to – that was certainly not how she seemed to think conversations should take place. I stood in awe of Her Majesty in the real sense of that word, hyper-conscious of my own smallness, however taller I was, in her presence. Like in her Christmas broadcasts, by which we have all set our Christmas watches, Her Majesty in private spoke without the loftiness or self-importance that her rank might have entitled her to or that many of us fall prey so, from time to time.
I think we shall spend many years reviewing the greatness of Queen Elizabeth the second, Queen Elizabeth the Great, and try to understand even better than we perhaps do now, exactly what she expected of herself and how she set an example to us all. We heard at the start of this service about her commitment as a 21 year old to the service of us, the peoples of the Commonwealth. That is a vast epitaph in itself. But in this uncertain world, I value its complementary principle to which Her Majesty held so strongly. And that is that however difficult things might be right now, we must standfast, love our neighbours, do the right thing and better times will follow. Service and steadfastness are truly the Elizabethan Spirit for our times.
I valued my relationship with The Queen and My Queen, in public and in private, more, I think, than I can yet adequately describe.
