When people looked at the Queen, what did they see?
On one level, the answer is obvious: they saw a living representation of the face they had absorbed, often without noticing, almost every day of their lives: on television, on coins and postcards, in newspapers and books and magazines, online, on walls, in galleries and on stamps.

Those presented to the Queen found the experience discombobulating. Though it may have been the first time they had ever set eyes on her, they were often more familiar with her face than with their own. Hers was the most photographed face in human history.

So to meet the Queen was apt to make you feel giddy or woozy, as though a well-loved family portrait, familiar since childhood, handed down from generation to generation, had suddenly sprung to life. For most, the experience was unnerving, even terrifying.

She was what we made of her. A friend of mine, a magazine editor, was asked to one of the Queen’s regular “informal” lunches for distinguished people from different walks of life. As he was ushered in, a senior courtier suggested that he might care to spend a penny. When he said he didn’t think it necessary, the courtier advised him it was best to be on the safe side: one or two previous guests had “had an accident” upon being presented.

The comic novelist Kingsley Amis was invited to one such lunch in 1975. “He had been terrified for days about the unpremeditated fart or belch and was on a strict non-bean-and-onion diet,” one of his oldest friends, Robert Conquest, gossiped sneakily to another, Philip Larkin. His fear reignited itself 15 years later. Before going to Buckingham Palace to receive a knighthood, Amis grew so frightened of defecating in front of the Queen that, in the words of his son Martin, he “had his doctor lay down a firewall of Imodium, and there was some doubt, afterwards, whether he would ever again go to the toilet”.

Perhaps she was less a painting, more a mirror. With her interior world screened from public view, and her conversation restricted by protocol to questions not answers, she became a human looking-glass: the light cast by fame bounced off her, and back on to those she faced. To the optimist, she seemed an optimist; to the pessimist, a pessimist. To the insider, she appeared intimate, to the outsider, distant; to the cynic, prosaic, and to the awestruck, charismatic. Having sat next to her at a banquet in Buckingham Palace in 1956, the Soviet general secretary Nikita Khrushchev came away with the impression that she was “the sort of young woman you’d be likely to meet walking along Gorky Street on a balmy summer afternoon”.

When people spoke of her, they spoke of themselves, and when they dreamed of her, they dreamed of themselves. She reflected their hopes and anxieties. “Princess Elizabeth and Philip are back in town, and across the street tonight,” wrote the troubled young suspense writer Patricia Highsmith, staying in Rome on the night of 19 April 1951. “Traffic bottlenecked & everyone angry & bewildered.”

I met her once, almost by chance. I was 20 years old, and a friend invited me to his parents’ 25th wedding anniversary. His parents were titled and unusually wealthy: their Kensington house came with a fake bookshelf in the sitting room, which led into a ballroom.

This ballroom was where the party was being held. I entered it early with my bunch of friends. I imagine we made an effort to smarten up, but we were, for the most part, a scruffy lot.

I must have been aware that the Queen was there, but I had no thought of meeting her. I felt she was for the real guests, the grownups. So it came as a surprise when, crossing from one side of the crowded room to the other, I bumped into my friend’s father, a very courteous man. “Ah, Craig,” he said. “Would you like to be presented?”

So there I was, a second later, shaking hands with the Queen. “Craig has been writing some amusing articles for Punch magazine,” said my host.

“Really? That must be fun,” she replied. I took this as a clear sign that she wanted to know all about Punch and Private Eye and the difference between the two magazines. I was unstoppable. Like most people she encountered, I found myself talking gibberish. I told her all about English humour, and Wodehouse and Monty Python and Just William and Marty Feldman, not forgetting Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. “How interesting,” she would chip in, every now and then, or sometimes, “Most amusing”.

As I kept talking, I noticed that, every now and then, she would take a step back. So I would take a step forward, and she would take a step back, and so on. We might have continued like this for ever – Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire – had my friend’s father not intervened on her behalf, taking her off to speak to someone else, and leaving me to make my way across the room, and back to reality.

Andy Warhol and the Queen were near contemporaries: the Queen was born in Mayfair, London, on 21 April 1926 and Andy Warhol was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on 6 August 1928.

I spent a few days shadowing Warhol on his visit to Britain in 1979, and noticed they had other things in common, too. They had both met an inordinate number of people (one out of choice, the other out of duty); both employed a similar stonewall defence in interactions, somehow appearing to participate in conversation without surrendering anything of themselves; both employed generalised enthusiasm in a truncated form. For the Queen, “How interesting” or “Really?” was usually sufficient to keep a conversation ticking along; Warhol was also fond of “interesting”, but more often employed its transatlantic equivalent: “Gee” or “Gee, that’s great”.

For meeting strangers, these non-committal, reflex exclamations were usually more than enough. The job of 20th-century celebrities was to mirror the expectations of those they encountered.

Warhol and the Queen both preferred to keep their feelings and opinions to themselves. “She inclines to say less rather than more,” Prince Philip once observed of his wife. Her critics would harp on about her blankness. Polly Toynbee once described her as “the past mistress of nothingness”. Similar observations were often levelled at Warhol, too, though in the bleak world of contemporary art “nothingness” was often taken for praise.

The Queen took her fame as a given. It was part of her, something she had to live with, like a birthmark. But Warhol, unknown until his early 30s, never stopped hankering for more. “I want to be as famous as the Queen of England,” he once said.

On one visit to England, Warhol visited Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s punk store on the King’s Road, which had recently been renamed Seditionaries. In the aftermath of punk, it had transformed from a revolutionary Situationist outpost into a pricey tourist destination for punk memorabilia, though Warhol failed to notice the difference. Among the retro souvenirs were T-shirts bearing the Queen’s head, rendered punk by the addition of the cut-out newspaper headlines “GOD Save THE QUEEN” and “SEX PISTOLS” over her eyes and mouth.

Three years on, Warhol’s dealer wrote to the Queen asking for permission to use her portrait in a series of screenprints. Ten days later, he received this letter back:

Dear Mr Mulder,
I am commanded by The Queen to acknowledge your letter of 6th September about Mr. Warhol’s plans to paint portraits of Their Majesties The Queens of Great Britain, Denmark and The Netherlands. While The Queen would certainly not wish
to put any obstacles in Mr. Warhol’s way, she would not dream of offering any comment on this idea.

Yours sincerely, W. Heseltine

By 1985, Warhol’s screenprints – brightly coloured versions of Grugeon’s original 1975 portraits – were ready. Warhol rode in Prince Rupert Loewenstein’s Bentley to the opening of his Reigning Queens exhibition on West Broadway and Green Street. He left early, filled with self-loathing. “I’ve hit rock bottom,” he confessed to his diary.

Nevertheless, Warhol’s personal interest in royalty remained constant. Few, if any, British artists shared his keen, almost feverish, fascination with even the most humdrum Royal goings-on. On a trip to London on 9 July 1986, he noted, “This is the week in between Wimbledon and Fergie’s marriage, so it was exciting.” And two weeks later: “I’ve been watching this stuff on Fergie and I wonder why doesn’t the Queen Mother get married again.”

He had once taken a fancy to the Queen’s second son, but with time his interest faded. “Prince Andrew has gotten so ugly, he’s looking like his mother,” he noted in his diary on 11 February 1987. This was to be one of his last entries: 11 days later, he underwent a routine operation on his gallbladder, and died.

But a quarter of a century after his death, Andy Warhol secured himself a permanent home in Buckingham Palace. For an undisclosed sum, the Royal Collection purchased the portrait of the Queen from the Reigning Queens portfolio in its expensive “Royal” edition, sprinkled with diamond dust, lending it a sparkly effect.

“Warhol has simplified Grugeon’s portrait so that all that remains is a mask-like face,” runs the official Royal Collection catalogue entry. “All character has been removed and we are confronted by a symbol of royal power.”

Another contemporary of the Queen, just six months her senior, was Margaret Thatcher. The 23-year-old Margaret Roberts first set eyes on her future monarch at Newmarket races in 1949. She immediately succumbed to a common delusion. “SAW PRINCESS ELIZABETH, AND SHE SAW ME!” she wrote in excited capitals in a boyfriend’s diary.

Thirteen years later, by now a married woman and the Conservative MP for Finchley, Margaret Thatcher was pleased to be invited to a reception at Buckingham Palace. “The Queen has a much stronger personality than most people realise and she is certainly not overshadowed by the Duke of Edinburgh,” she told her father in a letter home. As she gazed at the Queen that day, was she, like so many others, unconsciously thinking of herself?

Once she became prime minister, Mrs Thatcher would visit the Queen every Tuesday for her weekly audience in Buckingham Palace. These audiences were, says Mrs Thatcher’s authorised biographer Charles Moore, “rarely productive, because Mrs Thatcher was nervous. The Queen noted the way in which her prime minister could never relax in her presence. ‘Why does she always sit on the edge of her seat?’ she asked.”

The relationship between the two most famous and powerful women in the country was, in the words of the Queen’s private secretary, William Heseltine, “absolutely correct and perhaps not very cosy”. Heseltine felt this might have been at least partly the fault of the Queen, “for not coming in when Mrs Thatcher drew breath and turning the talk into more of a discussion”. For her part, the Queen seems to have been intrigued by what went on in her prime minister’s head.

“Do you think Mrs Thatcher will ever change?” she once asked Lord Carrington, Thatcher’s first foreign secretary.

“Oh no, Ma’am,” replied Carrington. “She would not be Mrs Thatcher if she did.”

How the two women interacted became a topic of speculation.

Susannah Constantine, who had for some time been the girlfriend of Princess Margaret’s son, Viscount Linley, once witnessed a tussle over a teapot between the Queen and Mrs Thatcher.

In 1984, at the age of 22, she went to stay at Balmoral. The Thatchers were fellow guests. “While Denis was actually very relaxed, Thatcher was awkward,” she recalled. In the afternoon, six or seven gathered by the side of the river for tea and sandwiches in a hut “the size of a suburban front room … one of them was the prime minister and another the Queen”.

A large teapot, known as Brown Betty, was ready on the table, “like the Queen herself, unfrivolous, sturdy and practical. Fit for purpose.”

As was her usual practice, the Queen lifted the teapot as Susannah Constantine held out her china cup. “As if by magic, a redundant Thatcher appeared at her side like a spectre. ‘Let me do that, Your Majesty.’”

Without further ado, Mrs Thatcher put her hand beneath the teapot to take its weight, but “her offer was met with unexpected resistance from the Queen”. Not knowing what to do, Constantine lowered her cup a little, whereupon Mrs Thatcher “tightened her fingertips around the base and tried once again to take the pot from its owner, but no … Evidently the Queen had no intention of relinquishing the fat, brown pot. A further, more determined pull from Thatcher was met with an equally resolute hold from Her Majesty.”

Constantine put her cup and saucer back down on the table. “I didn’t imagine the Queen was actually going to kill Thatcher … but it was quite tense. Then all of a sudden, without warning, the pot was free: released back to its rightful owner. Thatcher had thrown in the towel.”

Few who witnessed them together could resist gossiping about their peculiar dynamic; any signs of friction were beadily chronicled. For instance, on 10 September 1985, Kenneth Rose wrote in his diary that the Queen had complained to Lady Trumpington, “She stays too long and talks too much. She has lived too long among men.”

Gossip like this continued for many years after Mrs Thatcher’s fall from power. On 1 June 1997, Rose was Isaiah Berlin’s guest at “a sumptuous tea”. Afterwards, Rose wrote in his diary that Berlin had told him that Mrs Thatcher and the Queen had been at daggers drawn over the Commonwealth:

“Both the Queen and Thatcher came to a gala at Covent Garden, but sat in different parts of the house. In the interval the Queen let it be known that she did not want to meet Mrs Thatcher – who was sent to an upper room for drinks, as was Isaiah. Thatcher then said she would like to say goodbye to the Queen, a request that was ignored.”

But even after a decade or more as prime minister, Margaret Thatcher’s sense of old-fashioned awe in the presence of her monarch never left her. On Christmas Day, she would still make sure that lunch was finished in time to watch the Queen’s speech on television. “She revered both the constitution and the monarch,” recalled her devoted bushy-browed press secretary Sir Bernard Ingham. “That was manifested in the way she curtsied. I’ve never seen anyone go so low and I wondered if she’d ever get up. It used to be a bit of a joke – how low will she go this time?”

As her years in Downing Street rolled on, some observers began to notice that Mrs Thatcher was beginning, in a strange, shape-shifting way, to morph into the monarch. Little by little, she took on many of the Queen’s most familiar props: her thick-heeled patent-leather shoes, her handbag and, on formal occasions, her regal cloaks and gowns. She even started adopting the royal “we”, employing it in increasingly bizarre ways. “We are a grandmother,” she told reporters after the birth of her son Mark’s baby boy.

For her part, the Queen was known to find the Thatchers a little comical in their efforts to please. The Duke of Devonshire told James Lees-Milne that the Queen was “quite indiscreet” about the Thatchers. “She said to one of the equerries at the Palace while awaiting them, ‘Don’t make me laugh when Denis bows from the waist.’”

After the 1982 Falklands conflict, some felt Mrs Thatcher had usurped the role of the Queen by taking the salute at the victory parade; her visit to the Falklands the following January resembled a royal progress. “The constant references to ‘her’ troops proclaim that this is a royal visit,” wrote a commentator in the Times. After national disasters, she would lose no time in visiting the victims. “In the event of death or serious injury” read a joke badge, popular among her opponents, “I do not wish to be visited by Margaret Thatcher”.

In 1985, two psychiatrists, Dr Ian Deary and Dr Simon Wessely, reported on a new phenomenon in the British Medical Journal. Four of their patients suffering from advanced dementia – unable to remember their own names, or what year it was – were nevertheless able to name Mrs Thatcher as the prime minister. A study of files from 1963 and 1968 revealed one further oddity. In those years, Queen Elizabeth II had been identified with much greater frequency than either of the two prime ministers. But by 1983 “Mrs Thatcher … was clearly more prominent in our patients’ minds than the monarch.”

“We have become a nation with two monarchs,” observed the political commentator (and later novelist) Robert Harris in 1988. “ … On her housewife/superstar progress around the world, Margaret Thatcher has steadily become more like the Queen of England than the real thing.”

Some sensed a competitive edge in relations between the two women. During one of her annual diplomatic receptions at the Palace, the Queen noticed that her prime minister, feeling a little faint, had decided to take a seat. “Oh, look, she’s keeled over again,” she observed, coolly.

But if there was friction between them, it vanished with Mrs Thatcher’s departure from office. After giving the Queen notice of her resignation, “She was deeply upset,” recalled Lord Fellowes; “ … when she emerged, she was in a very distressed state and unable to speak.” Back in Downing Street, “she went straight upstairs to the flat and ran to the bathroom and she absolutely wept,” recalled her personal assistant. “She said: ‘It’s when people are kind to you that you feel it most. The Queen has been so kind to me.’”

In 2005, an 80th birthday party was thrown for Margaret Thatcher at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Knightsbridge. By now, a series of strokes had rendered her mind hazy. As she saw the Queen approaching, she asked, “Is it all right if I touch her?” She held out her hand as she curtsied, and the Queen took it and steadied her.

“That was unusual for the British, who know you are not supposed to touch the Queen,” observed her former private secretary for foreign affairs, Charles Powell. “But they were hand in hand, and the Queen led her around the room.”