Queen Elizabeth thought someone ‘greased the brakes’ on Princess Diana’s car

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Here are some photos of Queen Elizabeth at the 70th anniversary events for V-J Day (Victory in Japan) in London. The Queen was joined by her husband and her oldest and youngest sons and their wives. Everyone in the UK is doing a countdown on the Queen because in a few weeks’ time, she’s going to become the longest-serving monarch in English history. Because of that, and because of the fact that publishing books about royalty is a lucrative niche industry, Ingrid Seward is about to release a new book about the Queen called The Queen’s Speech: An Intimate Portrait Of The Queen In Her Own Words. Over the weekend, the Daily Mail published some excerpts – go here to read the full piece at the Daily Mail. While none of the information shocked me whatsoever, I realize that I’m a royal-obsessed Anglophile and some of this may be “news” to some people. So here are some highlights:

Diana’s death. When the Queen heard about the car crash in Paris, she said: “Someone must have greased the brakes.”

The Windsors were always close to the Spencer family. Diana’s father had served both the Queen and the Queen’s father, King George VI. When Diana was young, the Queen wrote to a friend regarding Diana: “She is one of us. I am very fond of all three of the Spencer girls.”

Seward swipes at Diana’s “shallowness”: In the early days, “the Queen made a great fuss of her future daughter-in-law, trying to demonstrate that she was interested in Diana for her personal qualities and not just for what she represented, as the wife of the heir to the throne. But Diana ran out of things to say to her. Understandably nervous, she didn’t want to have lunch on her own with ‘Brenda’ — her nickname for the Queen, taken from the satirical magazine Private Eye — and made excuses, even inventing non-existent friends to avoid the invitations.”

Was the Queen jealous of Diana? Seward seems to indicate that the Queen was bothered by the media attention Diana brought to the family, but Seward also says that the Queen looked out for Diana, trying to personally appeal to members of the press to go easier on Diana (who was at the time only 19-20). Seward notes: “This plea from the heart worked — but not for long. It didn’t help that Diana resented any shift of focus away from her.”

The Queen felt bad about her kids’ disastrous marriages: “In later years, the Queen would reproach herself for not seeing how much strain the Wales’s marriage was under…Though never giving way to mawkish regrets, she sometimes blamed the disintegration of not only Charles’s marriage, but Anne and Andrew’s as well on her own remoteness when the children were growing up.”

Charles told his mother that Diana was crazy: Seward writes: “Diana did nothing to dispel the accusation when she started hinting darkly that Palace courtiers were conspiring to smear her by using the Secret services to eavesdrop on her private conversations. The Queen dismissed this as nonsense, but refused to allow the family to discuss the Charles and Diana situation openly.”

The Queen was “bewildered” by the criticisms lodged at her following Diana’s death: “The Queen was bewildered by these criticisms. The business of the flag was mere protocol: she was not in residence, so the flag was not flown. Far more important, she wanted the family to stay in Scotland to give her grandsons a chance to absorb the shock of their mother’s death as far as possible from the public eye. Her first priority was to protect them.”

[From Daily Mail]

Obviously, if one is writing about the Queen, the other women are going to come across as “less than.” It still bugs me that even though Diana has been dead for almost 18 years, the official royal line is to paint Diana as the villain… except when they want to use her as The Cautionary Tale To Get Their Way. Even in death, no one agrees on Diana. For what it’s worth, I don’t think anyone greased the brakes on the car in 1997. I don’t think the Queen is to “blame” for what happened in the Paris tunnel, but she deserved to get all of the criticism for how she handled everything in the wake of Diana’s passing. Her actions were cold, bordering on vindictive – instead of showing true concern for her grandsons, she seemed to be saying, “Well, good riddance to bad rubbish.”

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