Book Review: "The Last Queen: Elizabeth II's Seventy Year Battle to Save the House of Windsor"

Despite its lofty title, Clive Irving's book rarely lives up to the stature of its ostensible subject

I’m one of those people who absolutely adores anything to do with the British Monarchy, particularly Queen Elizabeth II. I’ve devoured more than a few books about the royal family and their various squabbles and foibles, and I’ve been a devout watcher of The Crown since it premiered several years ago. Understandably, then, I was excited to see the release of a new book, supposedly focused exclusively on Elizabeth and her attempts to keep her family aloft in the midst of the tremendous changes of the 20th and 21st centuries. 

Unfortunately, Clive Irving’s The Last Queen: Elizabeth II’s Seventy Year Battle to Save the House of Windsor, never really lives up to its title. Indeed, for a book supposedly about the queen, there’s remarkably little of her in it. In fact, it’s only toward the end, when Elizabeth has to confront the foibles and the disastrous personal lives of her children, does he devote much significant attention to her, and even then he tends to talk around the Queen rather than about her.

In general, the book suffers from three significant flaws. The first is Irving’s tendency to go on at length about his own biography. To some degree, this is understandable, since he has been a part of many major British periodicals and has, indeed, done some fine investigative work. However, his focus on his own accomplishments tends to derail the discussion, and there are digressions about various issues and personages only tangentially related to the Queen and her life. This is most obvious in his discussion of Anthony Blunt, the Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, whose role as a Soviet spy was clearly very important to Irving. However, we’re left somewhat stymied as to how the discovery of Blunt’s treachery impacted the monarchy.

A more significant flaw is Irving’s tendency to indulge in a gossipy approach to his subjects. He was, we are told, well-acquainted with Antony Armstrong-Jones, the husband Princess Margaret. It’s clear that Irving has a lot of sympathy for Armstrong-Jones, particularly since he was a commoner who, though he married into royalty, never lost his common touch. However, its’ precisely this sympathy that sometimes skews Irving’s perspective and, of course, there’s the fact that Armstrong-Jones, as fascinating as he is, is not the Queen.

Irving’s indulgence in gossip and innuendo is even more notable in his discussion of Louis Mountbatten, Elizabeth’s cousin and Philip’s uncle and father figure. Irving gives us quite a lot of detail about this member of the extended royal family, and while much of it is very interesting, some of it relies far too much on unsourced information (particularly the allegation that Mountbatten was involved in the trafficking of young men). Given that Irving also doesn’t have many notes, it’s hard to say who, exactly, he is drawing from in his discussion. And, more to the point, the fact remains that Mountbatten is not the subject of the book.

Which brings us to the third and worst failing of The Last Queen. While Elizabeth does flit in and out of focus occasionally, there’s far too little in the book that is actually about her. When Irving does pay attention to her for an extended period of time--which doesn’t happen often in the book--he’s insightful. It’s clear that he has a lot of sympathy for Elizabeth the woman, who after all has had to work overtime to ensure that the institution that she has given her life to remains intact despite the tumult of the last thirty years. At the same time, he’s unsparing in his criticism of both her and the institution of the Crown itself, characterizing her as someone who isn’t particularly curious about much of anything other than horses and the Crown as plagued by courtiers who have done more harm than good to Elizabeth’s public reputation. 

That being said, there are some rather interesting parts of the book, including an extended discussion of the politics surrounding the name “House of Windsor” (which apparently caused quite a dustup among some members of the extended Royal Family, including Prince Philip), Edward VIII’s coziness with the Nazis (something that often gets swept under the rug) and, of course, the troubled lives of both Margaret and Diana. In fact, I would go so far as to say that these two extraordinary women, both of whom chafed at the ways in which the monarchy circumscribed their abilities to live their lives on their own terms. It’s pretty clear that Irving sees them as the true heroes of this story, though I personally would have liked to see a bit more detail about their relationships with Elizabeth, since she was the sister of one and the mother-in-law to the other. 

To some degree, I’m not entirely surprised that Irving talked around Elizabeth rather than about her, particularly if he believes that she’s not a terribly interesting person in and of herself. In that way, his narrative isn’t all that different from the last two seasons of Netflix’s The Crown, in which Olivia Colman’s Elizabeth gradually recedes into the background as her children and their various romantic escapades increasingly take center stage. While that’s all well and good, considering the fact that the series is forthrightly about the Crown as an institution, it’s very easy to lose patience when a book that promises to be one thing ends up being something else entirely. While it’s not entirely surprising, given the extent to which the monarchy has been shrouded in mystery and mystique for much of the 20th (and, to a lesser extent, the 21st) century, Irving should have taken this into account and titled his book appropriately. 

For those who want to learn more about the biographical details about Queen Elizabeth II or about the role that she’s played in public life--still less anything about her personal life--this book is unlikely to satisfy. Readers looking for a gossipy take on the various members of the extended royal family will no doubt find much to enjoy.