A Brief History of the House of Windsor (26 page)

As for the queen herself, she does remarkably well. She has, after all, been described as ‘riddled with common sense’, and would probably deal with such a change of lifestyle in much the way that is described in the story. She is shown as a much stronger character than her husband, and emerges as something of a heroine. She has been assigned a social worker to help her adjust, but is exasperated by the woman’s jargon-heavy and patronizing counselling, and shuts her out of the house. When, in the dramatized version of the novel, she berates a local government official in the manner of any outraged housewife, the audience cheers.

Meanwhile the republican government has broken its electoral promises, run out of money and sold the United Kingdom to Japan. One component of the deal is that Prince Edward will marry the Japanese emperor’s daughter. The story ends with the queen waking up to find that the whole situation has simply been a nightmare and that the Conservatives have won the election after all. Despite this, a sequel was written nearly fifteen years later. Queen Camilla continues the original plot,
with the royal family still living on their council estate, but it has not had the same success as the original.

Meanwhile, in reality, the family was living through its most difficult years since the abdication crisis.

The queen’s forty years on the throne were celebrated in a 1992 documentary,
Elizabeth R
. It was well made, and widely watched. It concentrated on her work, its purpose being to show how busy she is, how well she does her job, and what a pleasant personality she has. It was, however, a book rather than a film about royalty that was to make this year memorable. Andrew Morton, a journalist with some experience of covering the royals, published a book entitled
Diana: Her True Story
. It revealed to an astonished readership that the Princess of Wales was desperately unhappy in her marriage to Charles who was still seeing his former ladyfriend, Camilla. His family were portrayed as uncaring and unsympathetic towards Diana, who suffered from bulimia, an eating disorder, and had even attempted suicide.

It was later discovered that these revelations, attributed to friends, had come from the princess herself. She and Charles had reached the end of their marriage. They had never had anything in common. He had no patience with her vacuous cultural tastes and lack of serious thought. She was tired of his friends, his family, his courtiers, and above all his mistress. She briefed Morton because she was sick of living a lie. She wanted to hurt her husband, and she had found a way to do so.

Unfortunately she hurt others too. The queen, whose discretion had prevented her from prying into the lives of the couple, was as horrified by the revelations as she was by Diana’s trumpeting them in the media. She summoned them both and asked them to give their marriage one more try, though it was obvious to intimates that matters had gone too far.

This turned out only to be the beginning. Andrew and Sarah announced that their marriage, too, was over, and they were
followed by Anne and her husband Mark, though in this case the couple had already been separated for years. Yet another blow came in August, while the family were at Balmoral. The
Daily Mirror
had on its front page a photograph of the Duchess of York having her toes sucked beside a swimming pool, by a man identified as her ‘financial adviser’. Her daughters were shown nearby. And then the dam burst: another newspaper revealed transcripts of telephone conversations that seemed to be between Diana and a man, James Gilbey, with whom she was clearly intimate. His pet name for her caused the scandal to be known as ‘Squidgygate’. There were even more revelations to follow concerning Charles and Camilla, whose private telephone conversations were now published for all the world to read (‘Camillagate’). It seemed impossible that so much could have gone wrong so quickly – that such disaster could befall almost an entire generation at once. The year ended with one final tragedy: Windsor Castle caught fire on 20 November. The blaze was ferocious, caused initially by a light bulb coming into contact with a curtain. By a miracle the flames were put out before they spread to the Royal Library, and equally fortunately the rooms gutted, which included the great St George’s Hall, were largely empty because redecoration was going on. Nevertheless, the queen was clearly utterly dejected.

Her mood was not improved when the prime minister announced that taxpayers’ money would fund the restoration – the cost would be £37 million – and the news was greeted with a chorus of outrage. She was the world’s richest woman, said the press, why was she expecting her people to pay? ‘When the Castle stands it is theirs,’ wrote one journalist, ‘but when it burns down it is ours.’ The queen was shocked by the hostility shown toward her over this issue. It was the more painful for being so unexpected. In the end she paid most of the bill, but the opening to the public of Buckingham Palace for a few weeks each autumn, commencing the following year, was begun to help cover the cost. The queen also
announced that she and Charles would in future pay income tax. That they did not had been a source of continuing resentment, and she had been in the process of arranging to do so. Now she appeared to have been stampeded into the decision to assuage public opinion, which was humiliating.

Only four days after the fire she made a speech at the Guildhall that summed up, with gentle self-mockery, the awful twelve months she had endured: ‘This is not a year on which I will look back with undiluted pleasure,’ she said. She went on: ‘No institution, including the monarchy, should expect to be free from scrutiny. It can be just as effective if it is made with a touch of gentleness and understanding.’ For a stoical and self-contained woman to make such a plea is an indication of the level to which her spirits had sunk.

The troubles of Charles and Diana would continue for several years. There were more cruel and disturbing revelations – both in turn were interviewed on television and Diana revealed much, not only about her own recent past but about Charles’s fitness to rule. As soon as the programme was released, the queen gave up any hope of a reconciliation between them and asked that they divorce to save further damage. They did so, but the public had already taken sides in the matter and the mud-slinging simply went on. Charles returned to Camilla; Diana took up with a man many considered appallingly unsuitable.

And with him she died, on an August night in Paris. Pursued by photographers, their car crashed into the side of an underpass. The royal family were at Balmoral, where Charles had to break the news to his two sons. In the world beyond the estate walls, grieving was ostentatious and widespread. Diana’s gifts of empathy and compassion had been an enormous benefit to the monarchy. She had been able to reach out to people – especially the dispossessed and vulnerable – in a way that the Windsors could not. For a few months she would be treated like a saint, though after that the magic would start to wear off.

Her husband’s family, meanwhile, had done their grieving in private. Because they were not on view, people thought them callous, and even glad, that Diana had gone, and there was a stirring of public anger when the queen did not appear in London to share in the general mourning. Eventually she did return, and broadcast to the nation. The queen had, for the second time in a matter of years, misjudged the mood of her people. It was later suggested that general hostility was so intense that the monarchy might have fallen, but that is the wildest of exaggerations. When she returned to London, she was forgiven within hours, even minutes, for her absence. The death of Diana was a body-blow to the nation, but it was not a crisis severe enough to threaten the constitutional system.

By the start of the twenty-first century, these difficulties already seemed distant. The millennium began with a celebration of the Queen Mother’s hundredth birthday, and two years later there would be the queen’s Golden Jubilee. In the months before this, however, both the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret died, bringing a sudden end to the affectionate and tightly knit family circle in which the queen had spent her whole life. Margaret, who had not been revered by the public for decades owing to her self-indulgent lifestyle and unsuitable friends, had in any case been out of sight, suffering from illness, for some time. Her mother, who had carried on with undiminished lucidity if with waning energy, had just seen her great-grandson off to university, with the request that if there were any good parties he was to let her know. She had never, in the whole of her long life of service, known anything but the adoration of the British people. She was mourned by a million on the streets of London.

The Golden Jubilee was much like its predecessor a quarter of a century earlier, and like the Diamond Jubilee would be a decade later. There were the same tours of Britain, the same chain of bonfires, the same service of thanksgiving at St Paul’s. The royal family now included Camilla, married to Charles and created Duchess of Cornwall, as well as Sophie
Rhys-Jones, Countess of Wessex and wife of Prince Edward. Much attention focused on Charles’s two sons, William and Harry. New generations, new personalities. The monarchy is constantly renewing itself. That is why it remains strong.

The populism of the monarchy can produce some surprising moments. The queen took part in the opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympics by appearing in a film sequence with the James Bond actor Daniel Craig. She did this without any loss of dignity, though some courtiers must have thought that the situation would be touch and go. In the film she was called upon at the Palace by 007, and then accompanied him to a waiting helicopter, from which both of them, apparently, parachuted into the Olympic Stadium. The pink dress she had been wearing was clearly visible to the thousands below, who could not initially be sure that this falling figure was not Her Majesty rather than a (very masculine) stuntman. Minutes after the landing, the queen herself appeared and took her seat. Endearingly, she was later to ask the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, what the public reaction had been. The answer is that, in the context of the occasion and the whole atmosphere of the Games, it worked – though it might not have done. A Japanese commentator, apparently believing the monarch had actually made the parachute jump, remarked that the emperor would never have been persuaded to take part in such an event. The image will surely be one of the best-remembered of her reign, and certainly one of the most important royal photographs of the year. Since she volunteered to take part in the event, might it be hoped that this will banish forever the popular misconception that Queen Elizabeth II has no sense of humour?

‘All the time I feel I have to justify my existence.’

Prince Charles, musing on his role

‘Like all the best families, we have our share of eccentricities, of impetuous and wayward youngsters and of family disagreements.’

Queen Elizabeth II, quoted in the
Daily Mail,
19 October 1989

Charles was born 14 November 1948 at Buckingham Palace. His birth, like the marriage of his parents a year earlier, was seen as part of the national recovery that followed the Second World War. An heir to the throne was important for national morale and for that sense of continuity that the British people prize so greatly, and so, like his mother, he was to be the object of considerable public affection in his earliest years. Throughout this time he would be surrounded by flattery and indulgence (among other things he would be voted the Best Dressed Man in Europe – at the age of five), yet he would
not have things all his own way. His sister Anne, born two years after him, grew into a self-confident tomboy with an aggressive, no-nonsense approach to life that was inherited straight from their father the Duke of Edinburgh.

Charles was a somewhat timid, indecisive child, and seen as lacking toughness. His father certainly saw him in those terms, and was strict with him. Edmund Murray, Winston Churchill’s police bodyguard, recalled once being in the courtyard of Buckingham Palace and seeing a car pull up. Out of it got Prince Philip – pulling Charles by the ear. Faced with a role model of such towering presence and personality, Charles made repeated attempts to win his father’s approval, but he could not measure up. His thoughtful, reflective, introverted nature was simply too different. His mother was affectionate but left all matters concerning the children’s upbringing to her husband, and she was in any case often too preoccupied with affairs of state to pay much heed to his emotional development. It was unfortunate that his infant years coincided with his father’s posting as a naval officer to Malta (his mother therefore left him for months at a time to go there) and with her succession to the throne. She was so busy adjusting to her new role that, once again, his needs were forced to come second.

Nevertheless, his mother’s absence during his early years meant that he was brought up in the household of his grandparents. He began, at this time, the very close relationship with his grandmother that was to last for the rest of her life. She recognized his shyness as perhaps a characteristic inherited from her husband, and provided a refuge for him from both his mother’s preoccupation and his father’s strictness. Like most royal children he learned gradually that he was different from others. (It was his sister who was to ask their nanny: ‘Why do people keep waving at us?’) He noticed that sentries would present arms when he or Anne walked past them. She, as Princess Margaret had done as a child, would strut past just to see them go through this ritual. He, like his
mother at a similar age, showed an instinctive consideration by not doing so.

Charles and Anne were to be educated not at home by private tutors, as had been the case with their mother, but at schools. This was seen as a new departure for the royal family, though in fact its more minor members had been shipped off to boarding school for generations. The various male Kent and Gloucester cousins had all gone – or would go – to Eton, and as far back as the reign of Victoria one of her grandsons had been at Wellington. Nevertheless, it was unprecedented for the heir to the throne to sit in a classroom with a chance collection of other boys, and Charles’ s first day at Hill House Preparatory School in Knightsbridge was much reported in the press.