Queen Elizabeth II's 'hushed-up' 'near-breakdown' that saw her 'bedbound' for over a week
Our queen went through a very tough time
According to royal biographer Robert Hardman, Queen Elizabeth II’s summer of 1969 was less than peaceful.
The author opened up about this trying time for the late queen, speaking to Daily Mail’s Palace Authorised YouTube show.
He discussed how Queen Elizabeth II cancelled all engagements as she allegedly had the flu. However, Hardman believes that there was more to the story.
Queen Elizabeth II’s ‘secret breakdown’
Hardman unravelled Queen Elizabeth II’s reign in detail, in his book, Elizabeth II: In Private. In Public. The Inside Story.
There, he quoted an unnamed Palace source, who claimed that the summer of 1969 was a very tough time for the queen.
At the time, it was Charles’s investiture as Prince of Wales, which was said to have caused much stress.
The ceremony was meant to be a special event, with plans for it to be televised. Charles was set to earn his new title at Caernarfon Castle in north-west Wales, but in the run up to the big day, things turned dark.
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.
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“The ceremony was going to be the coronation mark two,” Hardman explained, but this all changed when two Welsh nationalist members of a paramilitary group known as the Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru, died whilst attempting to plant a bomb that was intended to disrupt the royal train on now-King Charles’s big day. “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.”
This building tension left Queen Elizabeth II “really worried that something was going to happen”.
A trying time for Queen Elizabeth II and King Charles
“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.
“The Palace said she was suffering from the flu – an odd thing to be suffering from in early July. Someone very close to her team told me that it wasn’t flu, it was nervous exhaustion,” Hardman claimed. “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.”
Of course, we now know that King Charles, then prince, was successfully invested as Prince of Wales. But evidently, the simmering conflict in the run up to his big day truly overwhelmed Queen Elizabeth, allegedly leaving her unwell.
Read more: Poignant claim made over Queen Elizabeth II’s only meeting with Princess Lilibet before her death
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