The royals - Kitty Kelley [106]
On the cold gray day of the funeral, the Queen lent her carriage full of blankets and hot-water bottles to Lady Churchill and her two daughters. Her Majesty then paid special homage to her first Garter Knight by arriving in St. Paul’s before his coffin and his official mourners, and not last, as is her due as Queen.
After the majestic funeral, the royal family joined the dignitaries from 110 nations* on the steps of the cathedral as Sir Winston’s coffin was returned to the gun carriage for the final ride to his burial place in the little country churchyard of Bladon in Oxfordshire. The Queen’s wreath was placed on the gravesite with a card: “From the nation and the Commonwealth in grateful remembrance—Elizabeth R.” The great bells of St. Paul’s pealed and the cannons reverberated as ninety salutes were fired—one for every year of Churchill’s remarkable life. Dressed in his naval uniform, the Duke of Edinburgh, who had been a young lieutenant during World War II, stepped forward to give the old warrior a last salute.†
“There can be no leavetaking between Churchill and the people he served and saved,” said Lady Asquith in the House of Lords. “Many of us today may be feeling that by his going the scale of things has dwindled, our stature is diminished, that glory has departed from us…. Then I remember the words of his victory broadcast—when he urged us not to fall back into the rut of inertia, confusion, and ‘the craven fear of being great.’ And I knew that the resolve to keep unbroken the pattern of greatness which he had impressed upon the spirit of the nation is the tribute he would ask from us today.”
Despite her ringing words, Britain had lost her greatness. The country was struggling to keep her footing in a cold war with a former ally, Moscow, while forced to make friends with a former enemy, Bonn. Four months after burying Winston Churchill, who had railed against “the hideous onslaught of the Nazi war machine with its clanking, heel-clicking, dandified Prussian officers,” the Queen visited West Germany. It was her first trip to the country that had battered England in two world wars. Her husband had gone there many times before to see his sisters and his brothers-in-law, but because of the bitter anti-German sentiments in England, his trips had not been publicized. The Queen had wanted to accompany him, but each time her request had been denied by the conservative Tory government, which knew that the public would never accept a royal visit so soon after the war. Now under a Labor Prime Minister, who wanted to end the old hostilities, the Queen was asked to make the trip in May 1965, the first time a British sovereign had visited Germany since 1913, when her grandfather, King George V, went to see his relatives.
At the time of Churchill’s death, the German newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau recalled the Nazi invective against the British Prime Minister. “Nothing remains of the Nazi tirades,” said the newspaper. “Those who authorized them have not only disappeared, but they have been proved wrong.”
The newspaper repeatedly warned Germans against screaming out “Sieg heil!” when the Queen inspected the soldiers of the Bundeswehr and the airmen of the Luftwaffe. Instead they were told to wave the paper Union Jacks that would be distributed and to call out her name.
Newspapers and magazines stressed the theme of reconciliation by publishing the Windsor family tree with its German roots, including the names of Elizabeth