Queen once came ‘close to nervous breakdown’, ROBERT HARDMAN claims,
The late Queen came close to a nervous breakdown during the turbulent summer of 1969, royal biographer Robert Hardman has claimed.
Speaking on the Daily Mail’s Palace Authorised YouTube show, Hardman said Buckingham Palace announced Elizabeth II had come down with flu as cover for the fact she had cancelled all engagements and taken to bed.
Daily Mail columnist Hardman has researched the late Queen’s reign extensively for his new book, Elizabeth II: In Private. In Public. The Inside Story. It released this month to celebrate what would have been her 100th birthday.
Hardman, quoting an unnamed Palace source, claimed the summer of 1969 was particularly stressful for the Queen due to Charles’s investiture as Prince of Wales.
The Palace had planned for the event to be a lavish televised ceremony, the first of its kind in colour, taking place in front of the world’s cameras at Caernarfon Castle in north-west Wales.
However, in the run-up to the ceremony, a Welsh separatist group had planted explosive devices in and around Caernarfon, with people killed both before and on the day of the investiture itself.
‘The ceremony was going to be the coronation mark two’, Hardman explained.
‘It was a very tense moment. Only a few months later, the trouble started again in Northern Ireland.
‘It was all over the world really – you just had the assassination of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy in America. People were really nervous, worried about the direction the world was heading in.’
Hardman said the pressure on the Queen and her family had been building steadily in the run-up to the investiture, adding that she was ‘really worried that something was going to happen.’
‘The Queen had always taken the view that if something happened to her, she’d live with it – die with it. It went with the territory. But this was the threat of terrorism against her son, his event and the family.
‘Afterwards, Charles went off on a tour of Wales. The Queen went back to London to bed, cancelling all engagements for the week. Very, very unlike her.
‘She was meant to be going to the Wimbledon Finals, had various garden parties, things to do. The whole lot was cancelled.’
Despite Charles being successfully invested as Prince of Wales, the Queen was said to have been left overwhelmed by the weight of the threat against her son and family.
‘The Palace said she was suffering from the flu – an odd thing to be suffering from in early July’, Hardman noted.
‘Someone very close to her team told me that it wasn’t flu, it was nervous exhaustion.
‘I don’t think you could call it a full nervous breakdown, because she was back on duty just over a week later – but it was the nearest thing to a nervous breakdown.’
Hear more revelations from Hardman’s new book by subscribing to the Palace Confidential YouTube channel.
