Queen pays tribute to Dame Jilly Cooper at literary festival

The Queen had an audience in hysterics as she quoted an “immortal line” from Dame Jilly Cooper and paid a public tribute to her “much-missed” friend.

Camilla opened the eighth Cliveden Literary Festival on Saturday and gave a speech in which she spoke about the author, known as “queen of the bonkbuster”, who has died at the age of 88.

She said Dame Jilly had attended a party at Cliveden House a few years ago, adding that she hoped the author had “uttered her immortal line: ‘I’m going to get absolutely plastered tonight, darling. I love you so much, I want to see two of you’.”

The quote was met with laughter from those watching, before the Queen added: “Dear Jilly, how we’d love to see just one of you here today.”

Camilla was among the first to pay tribute to Dame Jilly following her death after a fall last Sunday, describing her as a “legend” and a “wonderfully witty and compassionate friend to me and so many”.

The pair were long-standing friends, and the author based her fictional seducer and showjumping lothario Rupert Campbell-Black partly on the Queen’s ex-husband Andrew Parker Bowles.

Camilla also joked during her speech that Cliveden was “the setting for a rather notable scandal that made even Dame Jilly’s plots look restrained”, as she referenced the country hotel’s integral role in the Profumo affair.

“Perhaps we should draw a polite veil over that particular chapter,” she added, “and turn instead to the words of my husband’s great great great grandmother Queen Victoria, visiting her close friend, The Duchess of Sutherland.

“In her journal of 3rd April 1858 she wrote of Cliveden ‘it is a perfection of a place’.”

The Queen said: “Rudyard Kipling stayed here in the early 1900s. JM Barrie enjoyed strolling in the woods. George Bernard Shaw briefly came to escape the Blitz. Henry James and Edith Wharton holidayed here.

“Cliveden is praised in Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men In A Boat, it inspired Kenneth Grahame to write The Wind In The Willows and I understand that it is even possible to order Ian Fleming’s Vesper Martini at the bar, a drink that was a favourite of the late, much-missed Jilly Cooper.”

Before she opened the event, the Queen met the festival’s founders — Simon Sebag Montefiore, Natalie Livingstone, Lord Roberts of Belgravia, and Catherine Ostler, then met panel members participating in a session on the importance of reading and studying literature including Sir Salman Rushdie, Sir Jonathan Bate and Dame Marina Warner.

Camilla then hosted a reception attended by festival speakers, supporters, students from the London Academy of Excellence Tottenham and a representative of Book Aid International, one of the festival’s charity partners.

Writer Sir Ian Rankin spoke to Camilla at the reception, and said afterwards they continued a conversation they had when they met near Edinburgh a couple of months ago about “the problem that we have getting young people to read and keeping them interested in stories”.

Sir Ian said he was a fan of Dame Jilly’s book Rivals and was sent a gift and letter by her after he mentioned it in an interview.

He added: “I got lovely letters from her, long letters and cards and everything – think my wife was a bit worried at one point.

“She was a terrific writer, a terrific stylist, a terrific satirist, and I think her books are hugely enjoyable, but there are serious things in there as well.”

Sir Ian said: “She leaves behind a fantastic legacy, but I’m just sorry she’s not around to share a glass of champagne and discuss it.”

Sir Salman said it was the first time he had met Camilla which was “very nice”.

He said: “It’s great that she’s here to support books and reading. And so she spoke a bit about that.

“And she alleged that she’d read some of my books. So I believe her.”

He also said he had only been in the same room as Dame Jilly a couple of times but “she seems to have been a lovely person and it’s a sad loss”.