It’s been a wild year for royal watchers, especially experts such as Sally Bedell Smith. The DC-based historian is the author of eight biographies, including ones about Queen Elizabeth, (now) King Charles, and Princess Diana. Her most recent, about the late queen’s parents, is George VI and Elizabeth: The Marriage That Saved the Monarchy. Smith also writes “Royals Extra,” a Substack newsletter dedicated to all things Windsor. Here she takes us back to 2007, when she met the queen at the British ambassador’s residence in Washington.
“I had met both Charles and Diana, but never the queen. My husband and I went to a garden party given by Ambassador David Manning and his wife. One of the things you’re instructed before you meet the monarch is ‘Don’t ask her questions.’ She had just come from watching the Kentucky Derby, which had been high on her bucket list. The other admonition was ‘Never ask her if she bets on a race.’
“My husband, Stephen, had spent a lot of time around racetracks and learned a lot about thoroughbreds and how to, what they call, read a race. He and I had watched the Derby, we knew we were going to this reception, and we knew we were probably going to meet the queen. He’d absolutely predicted that Street Sense was going to win. So when we encountered the queen in line and were introduced, Stephen said, ‘Well, did you make a wager on Street Sense?’ Thereby violating two iron rules: He asked her a question and asked if she’d made a bet.
“But it was really interesting to watch this in very close range. She sort of tweaked onto the fact that Stephen knew something about racing. Everybody thinks they spend a longer time with the queen in conversation than they actually do, but it felt like a longer time. Between the two of them, they completely reenacted the Kentucky Derby win. She had never seen a race on dirt, which is what they are here—in the UK, they’re on grass. It was a very muddy track, and Calvin Borel, the jockey, kept pushing his goggles up. And she said, ‘Oh, my gosh! All those goggles, and I could see his yellow cap!’
“She was smiling and gesticulating, and I thought, This is the buttoned-up, reserved queen? She showed a totally different side of herself in that little interlude of conversation with my husband. She was too polite to turn her back to him.
“We had a good friend who was a portrait artist, and he had painted our portrait in 1988 in London. He had also painted both the queen and the queen mother. He talked a lot about his experience painting the queen, and the one sentence that stuck in my mind was ‘She talks like an Italian—she waves her hands all around.’ When I saw her talking about the Kentucky Derby, I thought, Oh, my God! I’m seeing what our friend saw when he was painting her.”
This article appears in the September 2024 issue of Washingtonian.
Daniella Byck joined Washingtonian in 2022. She was previously with Outside Magazine and lives in Northeast DC.
