It’s no secret that Queen Elizabeth II dealt with a lot of stress as ruler of the United Kingdom, but at one point, it almost crippled her, according to royal expert Robert Hardman.
On Tuesday, April 7, the author appeared on an episode of the Daily Mail show Palace Confidential, ahead of the April 9 release of his book Elizabeth II: In Private. In Public. The Inside Story.
According to Hardman, the sovereign allegedly had a near nervous breakdown in the summer of 1969, as an important event for the now-King Charles III was underway amid a scary time.
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“Prince Charles was turning 21 that year, and he was going to be invested as Prince of Wales, and they were going to have this big ceremony in the castle in Wales,” Hardman explained.
“That was all lovely except for the fact there was this sort of nascent terrorist movement, Welsh separatist terrorist movement, that started planting bombs around the place,” he recounted. “People were actually being killed in the run-up to and even on the day of this investiture, and it was a very tense moment.”
There wasn’t just unrest in the U.K. as Hardman noted “all around the world” it was a “very fractious, febrile time,” and “in the runup to that investiture, she, I think, was really worried that something was going to happen.”
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“This was the threat of terrorism against her son, against his event, and against the family. There was just so much pressure in the run-up to the event that afterward, it was really interesting,” Hardman said. “Prince Charles went off on a tour of Wales, the Queen went back to London and retired to her bed, and canceled all the engagements for the following week. Very, very unlike her.”
As for what the palace told the world, they claimed Elizabeth had the flu, which Hardman insisted “is an odd thing to be suffering from in early July.”
“Someone very close to part of her team told me it was nervous exhaustion,” he shared. “I don’t know whether we 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.”
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