The Last Summer
A new biography of Queen Elizabeth II arrives. Deep Crown has feelings.
One of the advantages of the paid tier is that the commercial imperatives that may govern the free edition do not apply in quite the same way when the reader has made a deliberate choice to be present. You are here because you wanted to be. I find that clarifying.
It also means I can write about Robert Hardman’s new biography of Queen Elizabeth II without mentioning something about artisanal preserves. For that, you have my genuine gratitude.
I will say at the outset that I approach this book with a complicated set of feelings. Not about its quality, which is considerable. Hardman is a serious biographer who has done serious work, and the extracts that have reached us in advance of publication repay close reading. My complication is of a more personal nature. There are accounts in this book of moments, rooms, decisions and atmospheres that I find rendered with a fidelity I can only describe as accurate.
She had a very good reign. I would prefer we leave it at that and examine the record rather than the mythology. Hardman, to his credit, largely does the same.
The Final Summer
The central and most affecting portion of the extracts published so far concerns the summer of 2022, the Queen’s last. What Hardman describes, drawing on sources who were present, is not a woman in sudden decline but one who had, with characteristic practicality, already arrived at a clear understanding of her situation and was managing it accordingly.
The Platinum Jubilee that June, seen at the time as a triumph, reads in retrospect rather differently. She appeared on the balcony at Buckingham Palace. She did not attend the service at St Paul’s, nor Royal Ascot, nor the Derby, nor the Jubilee concert. She watched from Windsor. Those of us paying close attention at the time understood this was not a scheduling matter. The explanation offered publicly was mobility. The reality, as Hardman’s sources now confirm, was rather more than that. One official describes the visible bruising on her hands from the cannula, and says simply, “You could tell she was having a lot of treatment.” She was, by all accounts, quite brave about it. That word, brave, appears more than once in the accounts of those who were with her. In my experience it is a word people reach for when they cannot find a more precise one, and in this case I think it is exactly right.
