Born to Be King: Prince Charles on Planet Windsor (11 page)

Most changes to the institution of monarchy during the Queen’s reign have barely rippled the surface, “imperceptible” in the words of one courtier; yet in their totality they’ve been profound and transformative. Everything is the product of instinct, not analysis or training. “I didn’t have an apprenticeship,” she once said. “My father died much too young and so it was all a very sudden kind of taking on and making the best job you can. It’s a question of maturing into something that one’s got used to doing and accepting the fact that here you are and it’s your fate. Because I think continuity is very important.”
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Unlike her long-serving heir, she benefited from only a few years of formal preparation for assuming the throne after her father’s unexpected elevation to kingship. This consisted of on-the-job experience and lessons from Henry Marten, the Vice Provost of Eton College, who instructed her in constitutional history including the works of Walter Bagehot.

A more vivid history lesson came courtesy of the Luftwaffe. In September 1940, a German bomber scored a direct hit on Buckingham Palace. “We heard the unmistakable whirr-whirr of a German plane. We said ‘Ah, a German’ and before anything else could be said there was the noise of aircraft diving at great speed, and then the scream of a bomb,” wrote Elizabeth’s doughty mother, Queen Elizabeth. “It all happened so quickly that we had only time to look foolishly at each other, when the scream hurtled past us, and exploded with a tremendous crash in the quadrangle.” The letter ends with a postscript, key words underlined in the family tradition. “Dear old BP is
still standing
and that is the main thing.”
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Her daughter understands that no edifice, however storied or solid-looking, is invulnerable. She has dedicated her life to keeping the monarchy standing.

In 1947 the Princess celebrated her twenty-first birthday in South Africa, during a royal tour that failed in its objective of revitalizing support for the pro-British General Jan Smuts, but launched the young Elizabeth as a future sovereign and gave a foretaste of the high solemnity with which she would approach the role. In a broadcast from Cape Town, she said, “This is a happy day for me; but it is also one that brings serious thoughts, thoughts of life looming ahead with all its challenges and with all its opportunity.” She spoke of the “terrible and glorious years of the Second World War” and looked forward with others of her age group to being “able to take some of the burden off the shoulders of our elders who have fought and worked and suffered to protect our childhood.”

“There is a motto,” she said, “which has been borne by many of my ancestors—a noble motto, ‘I serve.’ Those words were an inspiration to many bygone heirs to the throne when they made their knightly dedication as they came to manhood. I cannot do quite as they did. But through the inventions of science I can do what was not possible for any of them. I can make my solemn act of dedication with a whole Empire listening. I should like to make that dedication now. It is very simple. I declare before you all that my whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.”

In 1952 that earnest service started in earnest with her father’s death. Elizabeth was just twenty-five. Her daughter, Anne, not yet three years old, was deemed too young to attend the coronation. Charles, aged four, his hair already severely parted, rested a weary head on his hand as he watched his mother crowned. Ahead of the ceremony, she had undertaken practice sessions wearing sheets pinned together to give her a sense of the robes she must maneuver into Westminster Abbey and wore the imperial state crown around Buckingham Palace to try to accustom herself to its weight. “It goes on, the ceremony, for quite a long time, so you can end up with a terrible headache,” the Prince explained. “So I remember my mother coming up, when we were being bathed as children, wearing the crown. It was quite funny. That’s a vivid memory, I must say.”
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The new Queen found herself in charge of a palace system stocked with courtiers, who occupied positions as she did, by dint of heredity. She preserved some of the picturesque pomp and the florid job titles—she still employs a Mistress of the Robes; the Master of the Horse rides alongside her carriage at ceremonial occasions; she is serenaded every morning at 9:00 a.m. by the Queen’s Piper, though she once confessed that the sound of bagpipes had long since palled—but she has stocked key roles with professionals. The Keeper of the Privy Purse may sound ceremonial, but the title incorporates management of both the private and public revenues of the Queen, responsible for intricate budgets and for defending them to parliamentary committees. The incumbent since 2002, Sir Alan Reid, used to be a senior partner at the auditing and accountancy firm KPMG.

In 1957, a television crew came to Sandringham to film, for the first time, the Queen’s Christmas message. “I very much hope that this new medium will make my Christmas message more personal and direct,” she said. “It is inevitable that I should seem a rather remote figure to many of you, a successor to the kings and queens of history; someone whose face may be familiar in newspapers and films but who never really touches your personal lives. But now at least for a few minutes I welcome you to the peace of my own home.” She has continued to look for ways to bridge the gap between herself and her subjects. In 1958, at the urging of her husband, she quietly retired the custom for debutantes to be presented at court, opening her doors instead to a wider range of guests, often nominated by external organizations such as charities or selected as representatives of identity groups: women in business, Irish living in Britain, the Asian community. She holds multiple audiences, not just with Prime Ministers but with other senior figures of the British establishment, and travels around meeting as many people as can be filed past her. The number of bedecked and behatted guests turning up to her garden parties tops thirty thousand per year. “She likes a rapid throughput,” says an aide.

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In the years before Diana’s death the Queen signed off on significant changes in the way the monarchy interfaced with the rest of the state, advised by the so-called Way Ahead Group, a body of senior aides and royals that formed in recognition that the monarchy urgently needed to do some strategic thinking. On November 20, 1992, toward the end of a dismal twelve-month run that saw publication of Andrew Morton’s revelatory book about Diana and the marriages of three of the Queen’s four children collapse, flames gutted Windsor Castle, causing $58.5 million of damage and burning away the notion that Britons would unquestioningly shell out to maintain the trappings of their monarchy. John Major’s government, wrestling unsuccessfully with recession and the aftermath of a currency crisis that had just tipped sterling out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, announced that it would foot the repair bill, provoking outrage. “It was a bump in the road,” says Major now. “Even in the most difficult moments of the 1990s, there wasn’t a millisecond when the monarchy was in any real danger from the point of view of people up and down the country. It is deeply rooted … You don’t dig it up quickly.”
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The senior royals feared nevertheless that Britons might go in search of shovels. Four days after the fire, the Queen made a speech at Guildhall to mark the fortieth anniversary of her accession. “There can be no doubt,” she said, “that criticism is good for people and institutions that are part of public life. No institution—city, monarchy, whatever—should expect to be free from the scrutiny of those who give it their loyalty and support, not to mention those who don’t.”
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Yet the mechanisms for funding royalty had been kept deliberately opaque. A 1972 amendment to the Civil List Act for the first time inserted a requirement for the Treasury to review the Queen’s spending, but set the reviews at ten-year intervals. More frequent scrutiny, the law stated, would not be “consistent with the honor and dignity of the Crown”; daylight is dangerous. MPs were forbidden from asking questions about the royal finances except during the review period.

Monarchs from George III onward surrendered the assets of the Crown Estates to government in return for official expenses and annuities through the Civil List, later augmented by grants from various government departments. In addition, the monarch enjoyed a substantial—and tax-exempt—private income from the Privy Purse, mostly generated by the Duchy of Lancaster, an estate held in trust for the monarch and constituted along similar lines to the Duchy of Cornwall. Before the Windsor fire, the Queen had already held discussions about making voluntary tax payments, as Prince Charles already did, giving the Treasury 50 percent of his Duchy of Cornwall income in advance of his first marriage and 25 percent after that happy day.

Each review of the Civil List invariably drew headlines about “pay rises” for the Queen. The Prince had tried in the 1980s to head off criticism by exploring ways of fundamentally altering the financial arrangements between government and the royal households. His imagination was caught by a proposal to retire the Civil List and return the Crown Estates, and their income, to royal care. The idea wouldn’t fly, and not only because the costs of the monarchy by now exceeded the revenues from its hereditary lands. A self-financing monarchy would no longer be beholden to Parliament, becoming more remote, more royal, in effect more powerful.

The Windsor fire precipitated a compromise. The government announced that the Queen intended to pay income and capital gains tax on her private income and also to slash the numbers of royals living on handouts from the state by financing them herself. Charles echoed the move, opting to pay the maximum rate of income tax on his Duchy revenues. The Queen also implemented a cost-cutting program, agreeing that her court would live on a static budget for the next two decades. Still protests against the plan for a taxpayer-funded restoration of Windsor Castle smoldered. After the failure of a private fund-raising initiative for Windsor Castle that attracted only $40,000 in donations, the Queen found the money for repairs by opening Buckingham Palace to tourists. Around half a million visitors from across the Realms and beyond tramp through the state rooms every summer, producing a useful revenue stream and opening up a narrow strip of royal life to public view.

The Way Ahead Group eventually disbanded, but only after the practice of strategic thinking had been incorporated into the fiber of palace organization. That has meant continuing small-scale reforms and a few more eye-catching measures. In 2011 the Queen signed off on a new system for financing herself and future heads of state to a formula agreed to by the coalition government whose birth pains she had observed the previous year. The Sovereign Grant consolidated the grants and sources of income previously paid to the monarch via the Civil List and government departments, making the arrangements a tad less impenetrable and holding its custodians a touch more accountable and giving the Queen a smidgeon more of the independence the Prince had sought.

Guests and the tourists paying to visit Buckingham Palace enter a stage set, constructed and maintained to project majesty. Look closer, and you’ll find cracks in the edifice of monarchy, not so much metaphorical fissures as palpable decay that in 2007 sent masonry crashing from the roof, narrowly missing Princess Anne as she got into her car, and two years later dislodged a chunk of stone that came close to felling a police officer on duty. In March 2012 the Public Accounts Committee flagged up the statistic that 39 percent of royal properties stood, precariously, in need of remedial work. The committee’s chairwoman, MP Margaret Hodge, criticized the Queen’s household. “I expected to see a better performance,” she said. “They’ve got to get a bit real.”
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Nobody who has seen the back corridors of Buckingham Palace would assume the royal household to lack a sense of harsher realities. Away from the public areas, thick carpeting gives way to worn runners along corridors that branch into a series of domains: working offices, working kitchens, the engine rooms of an international corporation, and beyond those, staff bedrooms, guest suites, and royal apartments. The geography of the palace reflects the topology of the Queen’s life. Nobody can say for sure where the sovereign’s public duty ends and her private sphere begins. Paperwork and retainers follow the Queen like corgis. No royal home ever feels truly homely, but Buckingham Palace is the bleakest. Surrounded by more than eight hundred employees and a clutter of unwanted gifts and excess furniture, stacked Wellington boots and dog hair, the Queen, Prince Philip, and a shifting population that at times includes their children Anne, Andrew, and Edward and cousin Princess Alexandra, carry out their odd sort of work and their odder form of living.

“Most people have a job and then they go home and in this existence the job and the life go on together,” the matter-of-fact Queen tells viewers of
Elizabeth R
. “Because you can’t really divide it up; the boxes and the communications just keep on coming and of course in modern communications they come even quicker. Luckily I’m a quick reader so I can get through a lot of reading in quite a short time.… I do rather begrudge some of the hours that I have to do instead of being outdoors.”
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That is a rare complaint. Mostly the Queen just gets on with the business of being Queen, accepting the lack of freedom and restriction of personal space that entails and expecting her children to knuckle down to their fate with similar resignation. She planned to invite the Home Secretary of the day to attend the birth of Charles just as an earlier Home Secretary in 1926 had paced the halls of her parents’ house in Bruton Street during her own difficult delivery. She had grown up understanding that such invitations were part of a tradition dating back to 1688 when opponents of James II circulated a rumor that he had substituted an imposter child, smuggled in a warming pan into the palace, for his stillborn heir. Sir Alan Lascelles, her father’s Private Secretary, brought her the welcome news that the custom, like so many royal traditions, had been fabricated, in this instance spun to permit officials to cluster “in the private apartments of royalty daily, and particularly at moments of special significance such as births, marriages and deaths.”
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