Game of Crowns: Elizabeth, Camilla, Kate, and the Throne (30 page)

BOOK: Game of Crowns: Elizabeth, Camilla, Kate, and the Throne
12.24Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Camilla, who had looked nervous and distracted throughout the ceremony, spent much of her time on the balcony trying to corral her squirming three-year-old granddaughter Eliza Lopes, youngest of the three bridesmaids. The Queen stood to one side to allow William and Kate their moment in the sun, then briskly took charge and herded everyone back inside for formal portraits of the wedding party followed by an intimate “Queen’s Breakfast” for 650 guests. There were no tables piled high with wedding presents; the bride and groom, who had also invited representatives
of organizations that Diana had supported to the wedding, asked that donations be made to twenty-six of their favorite charities in lieu of gifts.

That night, a glittering black-tie banquet for three hundred began in the Ballroom and wound up taking over the Music Room, the State Dining Room, and both the White and Blue drawing rooms. There were the requisite toasts and speeches: Harry apologized to his new sister-in-law for “having to marry a bald man,” while Michael Middleton recalled how, during helicopter pilot training, William landed on his front lawn and nearly blew the roof off his house. Charles said he hoped his elder son would care for him in his old age, but now worried that instead he’d “push my wheelchair off a cliff.”

No one laughed harder—or less convincingly—than Camilla.

FOR KATE, WHO JUST FIVE
years earlier had been dumped by William, it had all been a remarkable reversal of fortune. It had also been no accident. Rather than wallow in the immediate aftermath of the sudden and shocking breakup, Kate—once again leaning heavily on her mother for advice and support—had taken matters into her own hands, vowing to win William back simply by making him jealous.

Looking anything but defeated, Kate donned thigh-skimming skirts and hit the London social scene with a vengeance—often with Pippa. Kate’s fun-loving sister had also been linked to a number of wealthy, powerful young men—one or two with titles. Before long, Carole and Michael Middleton’s daughters were being snidely referred to as the “Wisteria Sisters” because of their “ferocious ability to climb.”

Soon the tabloids were filled with tales of Kate’s exploits with and without Pippa. Most involved Kate showing up at William’s favorite London hangouts, where she openly flirted and dirty-danced with a succession of men.

Kate also joined an all-female rowing crew called the Sisterhood, which was pitted against the all-male Brotherhood in a twenty-one-mile race across the English Channel. Training consisted of rowing up and down the Thames three times a week, which generated more alluring photos—this time of Kate standing in her body-hugging racing outfit, skillfully manning the tiller at the stern of the boat.

Soon Kate, now down to a size four from all the additional exercise, chucked her tastefully conservative Windsor-in-waiting wardrobe for miniskirts and skin-tight designer jeans. “Far from appearing shattered,” Laura Collins and Louise Hannah wrote in the
Daily Mail
, “Kate sans William is cutting a frankly far sexier figure.” Their friend Jules Knight believed Will, who now spent his evenings drowning his sorrows at clubs like Bougis and Purple, “suddenly felt that he had made a huge mistake.”

On May 26, 2007—precisely six weeks after William broke off the relationship—William invited Kate to Clarence House and apologized. The public would learn they were back together only in July, when Kate reappeared with her Prince at the pop star–studded Concert for Diana marking the tenth anniversary of Diana’s death.

At one of their teas at Windsor—a ritual that took place less frequently but that both Her Majesty and the Heir still found valuable—William confirmed to the Queen that he and Kate were back together. Granny was thrilled (“I’m glad to hear it. She’s a nice girl”), but not merely for the sake of Prince William’s happiness.
She had long been concerned that William’s drinking might get him into serious trouble and plunge the monarchy into yet another scandal. Monitoring Kate’s “Keep Calm and Carry On” response to the breakup in the tabloids, the Queen was impressed. She instructed her private secretary to keep an eye out for a suitable occasion where she might finally meet the girl who stole her grandson’s heart. “I think,” Her Majesty reportedly conceded, “it’s time.”

In late April 2008 the Queen, fully appreciating the fact that her grandson was the sort of battlefield prize Al-Qaeda and the Taliban could only dream about, granted William his wish to serve with British forces in Afghanistan—but only for thirty hours. His top-secret assignment: Fly a C-17 Globemaster troop transport to the front lines in Afghanistan and pick up the body of a fallen British soldier.

Three weeks later, Kate was given a daunting assignment of her own—to fill in for William at the royal wedding of his cousin Peter Phillips and Autumn Kelly (the bride converted from Catholicism so Peter wouldn’t have to give up being eleventh in line for the throne). For Kate, the wedding proved that the Royal Family considered her an appropriate stand-in for Prince William at important functions. It also offered a proper setting for Kate’s first face-to-face meeting with the Queen. “It was in amongst a lot of other guests,” Kate said of her first conversation with William’s grandmother. Her Majesty was, she said, “very friendly and welcoming.”

As William’s military training—with the Household Cavalry, the RAF, and the Royal Navy—drew to a close at the end of 2008, it appeared as if the Prince was ready to become a full-time Royal. Instead, he surprised the Queen by opting to sign up for five years with the Royal Air Force as a search-and-rescue helicopter pilot.
He was still available to periodically meet and greet members of what the Royal Family called “the Chain Gang”—the mayors and other local officials who invariably showed up for walkabouts dripping with all manner of medals and ceremonial gold chains.

William knew, of course, that his destiny involved more than wreath layings and ribbon cuttings. The fate of a thousand-year-old institution—not only one of the world’s oldest but one of its greatest—rested on his shoulders.

Since 2006, William had been permitted to attend the twice-yearly sessions of the Way Ahead Group at Buckingham Palace. In late 1992, then Lord Chamberlain David Airlie set up the Way Ahead Group to steer a future course for the monarchy. In addition to William and the Queen, its members included Prince Philip, Princes Charles, Andrew, and Edward, and Princess Anne. They were joined by a handful of trusted senior advisors whose identities remained a closely guarded secret.

Free from any outside influences—not even the Prime Minister knew what was said during these closed-door deliberations—the Queen and those closest to her discussed a number of key issues confronting the monarchy. Should the Queen pay income taxes? The Way Ahead Group decided she should, voluntarily. Should the royal yacht
Britannia
be scrapped? The Queen grudgingly agreed that it was the sort of unnecessary indulgence that made the monarchy look bad, particularly in times of economic hardship. Should primogeniture, the ancient rule giving precedence to males over females in the line of succession, come to an end? Although he was by far the junior member of the group, William argued convincingly that such a rule was unacceptably sexist—and the rest of the group agreed. (On April 25, 2013, the Succession to the Crown Bill received the Royal Assent, and primogeniture
officially became a thing of the past. Under the new law, females now had equal footing with males when it came to determining who would inherit the crown.)

Camilla was not included in the Way Ahead Group meetings, but she wielded a great deal of influence with Prince Charles. “Her opinion,” said longtime royal press secretary Dickie Arbiter, “matters more to him than anyone’s.”

Although Charles was clearly fond of Kate, her family was another matter. The jury was still out on whether they would make suitable in-laws, and on that subject Camilla’s opinion carried considerable weight. “There was always a sense,” said a St. James’s Palace staffer, “that she was looking down her nose at the Middletons, and stirring up gossip about them. Maybe she felt threatened by Kate, or perhaps more by William and Kate as a team.”

There were more bumps on the road to the royal wedding. Just a few months after William and Kate got back together, images of Kate’s brother in a variety of sexually suggestive poses and situations surfaced online. Not long after, Carole came in for even more criticism than usual for appearing to use her daughter’s royal connection to sell princess-themed dolls, dresses, tiaras, place mats, cups, dishes, and tricycles on the Party Pieces website.

For three years, Camilla and the Men in Gray—most of whom still doubted that commoner Kate was a suitable mate for a future king—had been hearing stories about Kate’s wild Uncle Gary Goldsmith, the tattooed, profanity-spewing, cocaine-loving tech industry mogul who hosted William and Kate at “Le Maison de Bang Bang,” his crudely named estate on Ibiza. Camilla relayed the stories to Charles, but once again, the Prince of Wales had no stomach for blowing the whistle on the Middletons.

It was not until July 2009 that security officials who were concerned
about William’s safety leaked the information to
News of the World
, which promptly launched an undercover sting operation of its own. The headlines were scathing:
KATE MIDDLETON DRUG AND VICE SHOCK: TYCOON WHO BOASTS OF HOSTING WILLS VILLA HOLIDAY SUPPLIES COCAINE AND FIXES HOOKERS
. Worst of all, Goldsmith boasted about his royal connections to the undercover tabloid reporters, saying that he planned to give the bride away at Kate’s wedding to William, that he was looking forward to being the “Queen’s uncle,” and that he planned to be made a duke and have his own suite at Buckingham Palace, called “The Goldsmith Wing.”

Whether it was someone in Camilla’s camp or the Men in Gray who urged security officials to leak the story to the
News of the World
, the obvious intention was to derail William and Kate’s relationship. Yet the Queen, rather than turning her back on Kate, expressed sympathy for a young woman who found herself perpetually in the crosshairs of the tabloid press. “We
all
have relatives,” she muttered to an equerry as she perused her newspapers, “that we’d sometimes rather not think about.”

Indeed, in a matter of months an in-law would drop another bombshell on the Palace, once again courtesy of a
News of the World
sting operation. This time, the tabloid released an undercover videotape showing Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, soliciting a bribe of £500,000 (at the time the equivalent of more than $710,000) for access to her ex-husband, Prince Andrew. The enterprising undercover reporter, posing as an Arab sheik wanting to do business with the British government, had already snagged Prince Edward’s wife, Sophie, for influence peddling using similar tactics. Despite her wayward uncle and exhibitionistic brother, Kate, observed well-known British publicist Max
Clifford, “must have seemed like a dream to the Queen, certainly compared to the other daughters-in-law.”

Just as they had at St. Andrews, William and Kate fell back into the easy rhythm of living together as a young couple—this time in a rented five-bedroom farmhouse on the Welsh island of Anglesey, not far from the RAF Valley airbase. Given the remote location, an additional fifteen Royal Protection officers were assigned to protect the couple at a cost of $2 million. While she tended their garden and shopped for groceries at the local Waitrose supermarket, 22 Squadron C Flight’s newly minted helicopter pilot was at the controls of his Sea King Mk 3, rescuing hikers stranded in the nearby Snowdonia Mountains and plucking heart attack victims off oil rigs in the Irish Sea.

There was still time for some on-the-job training of an entirely different sort. In early 2010, Kate stayed home in Wales while William journeyed to Australia and New Zealand on his first overseas tour. By choosing William to make the trip instead of Charles, the Queen gave rise to talk that her grandson was now her “Shadow King”—the person she was actively grooming for the top job.

William was distressed by any suggestion that he was trying to supplant the Prince of Wales as rightful heir to the throne. “My father works tremendously hard,” protested William, pointing to the hundreds of millions of dollars Charles’s Prince’s Trust had raised for charity since its inception in 1976. The Trust, in alliance with The Prince’s Charities, included sixteen separate organizations, all of which were presided over by Charles. “He is a marvelous, generous man who has really made an enormous impact on the world,” William said. “My father is a great man in his own right, but unfortunately not everyone sees that.”

Prince Charles’s accomplishments aside, the Queen was determined
to give her grandson the grounding in matters of state that a sovereign requires. Toward that end, she personally recruited Sir David Manning, the Court of St. James’s former ambassador to the United States and Israel, to serve as William’s guide and mentor. Just to make sure all went well in Australia and New Zealand, she also asked her trusted private secretary, Sir Christopher Geidt, to tag along.

BOOK: Game of Crowns: Elizabeth, Camilla, Kate, and the Throne
12.24Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

DevilishlyHot by Unknown
Dreaming of Antigone by Robin Bridges
Urban Necromancer by Chard, Phil
Aftershock by Mark Walden
Chantilly’s Cowboy by Debra Kayn
The Spook's Battle by Joseph Delaney