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FOREWORD

TO THE GOLDEN JUBILEE EDITION

In my Preface to the paperback edition of The Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth II, published a year after the hardback, I excused myself for not adding new material by saying that ‘an extra chapter would be part of another book’. I meant that any historical account is a snapshot, not just of its subject matter, but of the attitudes of the author when it is written. In this sense, The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy is another book. The first edition of The Queen was researched and written in the mid-nineties. It appeared in 1996, the year of the divorce of the Prince and Princess of Wales, and doubtless reflects that timing. This Golden Jubilee edition has been prepared several years later. It contains not one additional chapter, but five. The result is a book which has an altered shape from the original, while at the same time offering in the extra chapters a different snapshot.

Chapters 1 to 23 are little changed. There are a few corrections and stylistic tightenings, but I have not attempted to revise my interpretation. The new material is contained in Chapters 24 to 28. Here I have examined post-1996 events and sought to place them in the context of the Queen’s life and reign as a whole. I have also looked more closely – partly in the light of ‘Diana week’ – at aspects of the Monarch’s role that go beyond the purely constitutional or symbolic. If there is a new theme, it has to do with the ancient (but also apparently continuing) concept of ‘royalty’. At the same time, I have tried to integrate the added chapters so that the reader who comes to the book afresh can take it as a single work, and move from old to new without too great a sense of the division. The revised title is intended to indicate the shift in the book’s centre of gravity, and also to distinguish this edition from earlier ones.

I have included the original (hardback) Preface, and I would like to repeat my thanks to the people listed there, many of whom have been re-interviewed or who have given help with this edition in other ways. In particular, I would like to record my unique debt to the late Lord Charteris – a great royal and public servant with whom I spent many happy, instructive and sometimes hilarious hours in the cell-like interview rooms of the Palace of Westminster, and whose voice I often used to illuminate my text. In addition, I should like to thank the staff of the Buckingham Palace press office, and especially Geoff Crawford and Penny Russell-Smith, successively Press Secretaries to the Queen; together with Mary Francis, Peter Galloway, David Hill, Stephen Lamport, Robin Ludlow, Lady Penn, Frank Prochaska and a number of others who prefer not to be named. I should once again like to give my special thanks to Arabella Pike of HarperCollins, for her encouragement and ever incisive advice. I should also like to thank Aisha Rahman for her care and efficiency in guiding the Golden Jubilee edition through to publication. Caroline Wood has again provided invaluable help as picture researcher. At Goldsmiths, I am extremely grateful to Edna Pellett for typing an illegible (sometimes even to the author) manuscript with astonishing skill and without reproach. I would also like to thank Jef McAllister, London Bureau Chief of Time Magazine, and the staff at the Australian High Commission, for their kindness in providing access to newspaper and other files; and Dan and Nat Pimlott for their resourcefulness in sifting through them.

New Cross, London SE14 September 2001