The royals - Kitty Kelley [120]
For Charles, the importance of marrying well was again underscored in November 1972, when he and his sister held a dinner party to celebrate his parents’ silver wedding anniversary. The country paused to honor the Queen’s twenty-five-year marriage to Prince Philip in a celebration that lasted all day. Schoolchildren were given a holiday, and the Queen invited one hundred couples to attend a commemorative service in Westminster Abbey. Although the couples were all strangers, they shared Her Majesty’s wedding date. So she invited them to pray with her. At the end of the service, the Duke of Edinburgh moved into the center aisle and crooked his arm to escort his wife out of the Abbey, just as he had on their wedding day. But Her Majesty was no longer looking in his direction, so the arm was not taken. The couple walked out side by side, smiling but not touching, a reflection of their marriage, which was an effective partnership—congenial, but not intimate.
Thousands of people poured into the City of London to hear the Lord Mayor praise the Queen as an unfailing example in public and private life. “Through the medium of television you have allowed us to look into your uncurtained windows more freely than any generation before,” he said. “Of the many great services which you tendered to your subjects in these twenty-five years, that vision of this happiness in family life which you and your consort and your children so evidently enjoy yourselves must have strengthened the unity of every family in the land.”
Even Willie Hamilton offered his congratulations. Parliament’s most outspoken critic of the monarchy surprised people with his tribute. Seconds later, though, he criticized the commemorative plates and spoons being hawked on the street and slammed “the sordid, greedy commercialization of the event and the money-grubbing loyalists, who are busy cashing in on the irrational sentiment worked up on this unusual royal occasion.” He suggested that the Palace should have stipulated all profits be donated to charity, particularly to children who were born deformed because their mothers had taken the drug thalidomide. The Palace ignored his suggestion.
“I looked like a crank then,” he recalled. “Twenty years later, I looked like a prophet.”
The Queen was so pleased to share her wedding anniversary that she ventured from her customary reserve and circulated among her subjects, trying to make small talk. People were agog; their sovereign had never been known to speak to ordinary people. This was the first royal walkabout London had ever seen, and flag-waving Britons cheered as the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Charles, and Princess Anne melted into the crowd, greeting people and trying to make the royal family appear less remote.
Stressing her commitment to family life, Her Majesty made a short talk of lace-capped innocence. “A marriage begins by joining man and wife together, but this relationship between two people, however deep at the time, needs to develop and mature with the passing years. For that, it must be held firm in the web of family relationships, between parents and children, between grandparents and grandchildren, between cousins, aunts, and uncles.”
When she spoke those words, most Britons, according to a 1972 Harris poll, believed it was the monarchy that set the standard of morality for the country, even more so than the church. Such confidence in the Crown prompted the Queen to send a “gracious message” to Parliament asking for a pay raise. Although one million people were out of work at the time, no member of Parliament, except one,* wanted to deprive the sovereign of her tax-free allotment from the Civil List.
“Why should she get millions when old-age pensioners will die of cold and starvation this winter?” Hamilton asked from the floor of the House of Commons. Outraged Tories rushed to their feet, shouting in protest. The Labor MP paid no attention. “And look at this,” he thundered, waving a list of the Queen Mother’s staff of thirty-three, including five Ladies of the Bedchamber and