Game of Crowns: Elizabeth, Camilla, Kate, and the Throne (21 page)

Mrs. PB was “Satan incarnate as far as the Queen Mother was
concerned,” Brooks-Baker said. “She was deeply troubled by their affair from the very beginning.” In the presence of Charles, however, William’s great-grandmother said nothing. “The one tricky thing between them was that the Queen Mother never mentioned Camilla to Charles at all,” said royal historian Hugo Vickers. “It was almost as if she didn’t exist.” Charles adored his grandmother, as she adored him, and over the years they shared their deepest thoughts with each other. “Charles is a great love of mine,” she once wrote to Elizabeth. To Charles, his grandmother’s complete silence on the subject of Camilla spoke volumes.

The Queen Mother made her daughter promise that she would not give her consent to a marriage between Charles and Camilla—an easy promise to keep, or so it seemed, since Camilla remained wildly unpopular. According to one Palace advisor, the Queen suspected that Charles might use his sons to hasten Camilla’s rehabilitation in the eyes of the public. If Diana’s own sons approved of Camilla, then how could the average Briton reject her? But Elizabeth worried that the public’s love of Diana and corresponding resentment of Camilla ran too deep. The woman Diana called the Rottweiler was still toxic. If he were to be seen with her in public, William might do irreparable damage to his own reputation—a heretofore pristine image upon which the future of the monarchy rested.

The Queen had little influence over Charles, but William and Harry were another matter. She ordered that the young princes were not to appear in public together with Camilla, and that under no circumstances were they to be photographed together.

While Camilla tried to forge a relationship with William and Harry behind closed doors, the Queen was busy trying to regain the trust of her subjects. She had woefully underestimated the
spell Diana cast over not only the British people, but the world at large. The Palace’s first move was to hire an outside public relations firm to tell the tone-deaf monarch how best to proceed.

In the course of twenty-four months, Elizabeth II listened to her new team of image consultants and then took unprecedented steps to win back her subjects. The Queen visited a pub for the first time, as well as a McDonald’s, and took her maiden ride in one of London’s iconic taxicabs. She commanded that henceforth all curtsying and bowing to Royals should be strictly voluntary (the crown presumably would not take offense if one didn’t), and agreed to major changes in the laws of succession—namely, ending primogeniture so that the monarch’s eldest child, not just the eldest son, would become heir to the throne. Although the Royal Family had been voluntarily paying taxes since 1993, the Queen also agreed to release financial records that previously had been considered top secret.

William and Harry got some sobering financial news of their own. Diana had bequeathed the bulk of her $35 million estate to her sons, but Inland Revenue informed them that 40 percent of that was to be paid in taxes—a whopping $14 million. In the end, they divided the remaining $21 million, with $10.5 million being place in trust for each.

EVEN AS THE ROYALS TRIED
to adjust to what would become the new normal, sixteen-year-old Kate Middleton was making some big changes of her own. Over the summer of 1998, she underwent a transformation from mousy bookworm to chestnut-maned beauty. Not that Kate was ever considered glamorous, or a clothes horse. Unlike most of the other female students who, said fellow
student and friend Gemma Williamson, dressed “quite tartily to attract the boys,” Kate’s look was casual, subdued, conservative. “Sweaters and jeans and almost no makeup—just totally natural,” Williamson added. “Everything looked good on her, because she had such a perfect body.”

Now determined to take risks and be noticed, she even started flashing her naked derriere at boys from her second-story dormitory window. Unfortunately, her passion for mooning became something of an obsession; over the course of the year she exposed her nude posterior to exceedingly grateful male students no fewer than ninety times. “She kind of got addicted to it,” said her schoolmate and close friend, Jessica Hay. Soon, she was known across the campus as “Kate Middlebum”—a moniker that, according to her friends, Kate took considerable pride in.

With the exception of a few relatively innocent “snogging” (necking) sessions here and there, Kate never had a serious boyfriend at Marlborough. “She never,” Hay said bluntly, “lost her virginity at school.” She did, however, eagerly devour every morsel she could find in the tabloids about the Heir. Hay, who wound up dating William’s cousin and fellow Etonian Nicholas Knatchbull for three years, was also a valuable source of information. Kate “wanted to know everything I could find out about William,” she said. “When I told him how shy he was, and that he had a wonderful sense of humor, she just sighed.”

Kate paid less attention to what was going on in the lives of the older Royals, but most of her countrymen were still riveted by the continuing saga of Charles and Camilla. In January 1999, they made their first public appearance together on the steps of the Ritz Hotel in London’s swank Mayfair district.

It was no accident that they chose this moment and this particular event—a fiftieth birthday bash for Camilla’s sister Annabel—to make what amounted to a public proclamation of their love. It was exactly ten years earlier, at Annabel’s fortieth birthday party, that Diana had pushed past Charles and his friends to confront a shaken Camilla for the very first time.

As 150 cameramen snapped away, Charles walked Camilla to their waiting car and then stopped to put his arm around her. Camilla’s children, Tom and Laura Parker Bowles, stood behind them at the top of the hotel’s stairs, beaming with pride. Noticeably absent were William and Harry, who, in accordance with the Queen’s wishes that they not be seen in public with Camilla, were not invited.

Operation PB continued apace into the spring, with Camilla returning to the London Ritz that May to host a dinner for the National Osteoporosis Society. This time she was intent on flaunting her status as the future monarch’s official mistress; on her right collar glittered a diamond brooch bearing the Prince of Wales’s distinctive emblem of three plumed feathers. Later, when she and Charles made what was only their third public appearance together, Camilla wore a spectacular $200,000 necklace that had been a favorite of Diana’s. “It’s simply heartbreaking,” said the late Princess’s friend Vivienne Parry, “to see someone else wearing Diana’s things.”

The Queen was not amused. Ignoring Charles’s protests, she barred Camilla from attending the June 19, 1999, wedding of her youngest son, Prince Edward, to Sophie Rhys-Jones. If there was any doubt that Elizabeth still resented Camilla, it vanished when reporters asked if this obvious snub meant that Her Majesty was
still a long way from welcoming Charles’s notorious mistress into the bosom of the Royal Family. The Queen, a Palace spokesman answered succinctly, “made it clear that any rapprochement is out of the question.”

The Queen’s express order that Camilla’s children keep their distance from William sat well with Kate. She worried that Tom Parker Bowles might be a bad influence, along with William’s other club-hopping, drug-abusing aristo pals. Tom, who frequented London’s trendiest nightspots with William, had been convicted of possessing marijuana and the drug ecstasy in 1995. Now he admitted to snorting cocaine in clubs William frequented, along with Nicky Knatchbull and another of William’s cousins, Lord Frederick Windsor.

The Queen’s own fondness for gin made her somewhat tolerant of other people’s alcohol consumption, and she usually looked the other way when she heard stories about drug abuse among members of the aristocracy. But it was all very different where William was concerned. The Queen paid very close attention to the people William consorted with, routinely asking her advisors to weigh in on the young women and men he invited to join his inner circle.

“The stories of drug use by William’s friends shocked and upset the Queen,” said a longtime staff member at St. James’s Palace. “She was especially angry about Tom Parker Bowles, and she told Prince Charles to do something about it.”

Unlike the very hands-on Diana, Camilla had always been a laissez-faire parent, reluctant to discipline her children. With Camilla’s blessing, Charles came down hard on Tom, scolding him for embarrassing his mother and barring him from contact
with William until he cleaned up his act. The Prince of Wales sent similarly stern warnings to Nicky Knatchbull’s parents, Lord and Lady Brabourne, and to Lord Freddie Windsor’s father and mother, Prince and Princess Michael of Kent.

“When you’re in the Firm, and the Queen and the Prince of Wales come down hard on you,” a friend of Prince Michael said, “you feel it.”

Not that Kate doubted for a moment that William had, as she put it, “the good sense to stay away from drugs.” She was less sanguine about his choices in the romance department. Now that William and Harry had their own digs at York House, the northwestern wing of St. James’s Palace where, ironically, a nineteenth-century Duke and Duchess of Cambridge once lived, they occasionally entertained female visitors—albeit always ostensibly for “tea.”

Even as Kate wound down her final year at Marlborough without a boyfriend, the tabloids were filled with stories about the highborn young ladies circling around the future king. The most notable of these were Emilia (Mili) d’Erlanger, the niece of Viscount Exmouth as well as a schoolmate of Kate’s; Diana’s distant cousin Davina Duckworth-Chad, dubbed “the Deb on the Web” after donning a rubber dress to promote a website; and Alexandra Knatchbull, William’s stunningly beautiful third cousin.

Equally eyebrow-raising were the torrid emails William exchanged with two Americans: model Lauren Bush, the niece of soon-to-be President George W. Bush and granddaughter of President George H. W. Bush, and Britney Spears. The playful correspondence with Spears began after William, who actually had her photo taped to his bedroom wall at Eton, invited the pop
star to a party he was throwing to celebrate the arrival of the new millennium.

Sadly, the planned “Willennium,” as he took to calling it, never got off the ground. Instead, he wound up bingeing with friends at the Norfolk home of Diana’s sister, Lady Jane Fellowes. The next day, Lady Jane’s husband, Sir Robert Fellowes, reported to his boss the Queen that her grandson had survived the dawn of 2000—but not without consequences. On his first official trip to Wales with his father two days later, the future Prince of Wales told British Airways flight attendant Claire Owens that he was “still hung over from the Millennium—I think everyone is.”

The Queen, meanwhile, embarked on a daunting two-week tour of Australia—her thirteenth visit Down Under as monarch—in March 2000. Just a few months before, Australia had voted by a slim margin to keep the Queen as their head of state even though polls showed a strong majority in favor of leaving the Commonwealth and becoming a republic. Experts believed the vote would have gone the other way had it not been for the fact that the proposed changes did not provide for the direct election of a president.

In a speech at the Sydney Opera House, Elizabeth told her hosts that “the future of the monarchy is an issue for you, the Australian people, and you alone to decide.” But she also reminded them that, whatever their choice, her “deep affection will remain as strong as ever.”

Along with the rise in Scottish nationalism, polls showing that two-thirds of Canadians wanted to get rid of the Queen as their head of state, and similar rumblings throughout the Commonwealth, Australia’s referendum left Elizabeth badly shaken. If the monarchy was to survive, Lord Charteris had told her immediately
after the Australian vote, everything would depend on the personal popularity of the next sovereign.

The Queen had regained much of her standing since the public relations debacle that followed Diana’s death, and she had no illusions about why. Britons were fast in the thrall of the late Princess of Wales’s handsome, athletic, dynamic, and engaging young sons. Harry, whose paternity grew increasingly in doubt as he grew more and more to strongly resemble James Hewitt, was cast as the likable, mischievous scamp. William was also fun-loving and charismatic, but possessed an air of maturity and seriousness befitting the heir. He also looked the part of a king; at six feet three inches he would be the tallest monarch since Henry VIII.

Conversely, Charles had always seemed aloof, supercilious, and, to the average Briton, deadly dull. Then there was the matter of Camilla; while she was no longer pelted with bread and booed in the streets, the Prince of Wales’s slatternly mistress still represented the biggest threat to the future of the monarchy. “The Queen began to understand what Diana meant,” said a former deputy private secretary, “when she said she was putting all her hopes on William.”

Needless to say, William and Harry were not the only Royals who commanded the public’s affection. The Queen threw a grand ball for more than eight hundred guests at Windsor Castle on June 21 to celebrate the seventieth birthday of Princess Margaret, Princess Anne’s fiftieth, and Prince Andrew’s fortieth. Two weeks later, on the Queen Mother’s hundredth birthday, Prince Charles rode with his grandmother in a horse-drawn carriage from St. James’s Palace up the Mall to Buckingham Palace. As she stepped out onto the balcony, a throng of well-wishers applauded and cheered. Coming just three years after Diana’s death brought
the monarchy to its knees, the public outpouring of devotion was reassuring. The Queen Mother, however, took it in stride. “It’s all very nice, dear,” she joked as she prepared to down her second gin and tonic of the evening. “But I won’t be around forever.”

While she
was
around, the Queen Mother let it be known that she still disapproved of her grandson’s mistress. Elizabeth included Andrew Parker Bowles—a longtime Royal Family favorite—on the guest list for the Queen Mother’s hundredth birthday dinner at Windsor Castle, but given the birthday girl’s lingering resentment, Camilla was pointedly excluded. Thus far, Camilla had been an overnight guest at Balmoral and Holyrood in Scotland, Sandringham, and even Buckingham Palace when the sovereign was not in residence. Windsor was the only royal residence where Camilla hadn’t spent the night, and apparently the Queen Mum meant to keep it that way.