Game of Crowns: Elizabeth, Camilla, Kate, and the Throne (32 page)

In his own televised interview, William admitted that for a long time he found “Granny” intimidating. “Being a small boy, it’s very daunting,” he said, “seeing the Queen around and not
really quite knowing what to talk about.” Now, he added, “we are definitely a lot closer than we used to be.” Close enough, it turned out, for William and Kate to ask her what to do when they were given a wedding guest list with the names of 777 people on it—none of whom the couple knew. The Queen’s advice: “Tear it up and start with your friends. We’ll add those we need to in due course. It’s your day.” In the end, William said he wanted to “take all of her experiences, all of her knowledge and put it in a small box and be able to constantly refer to it.”

On Sunday, June 3, the Queen and Prince Philip boarded the
Spirit of Chartwell
, a 210-foot luxury cruiser that had been transformed into an opulently appointed, flower-festooned royal barge reminiscent of the royal barges in use during the reign of the first English sovereign named Elizabeth. More than l.2 million Britons lined the banks of the Thames in a driving rain to watch as a flotilla of more than a thousand vessels passed in review. Representing every corner of the Commonwealth, the fleet included tall ships, tugboats, cutters, fishing boats, fireboats, kayaks, launches, cruisers, gondolas, skiffs, Viking longships, dragon boats, trawlers, a “jolly boat” carrying pirates, a torpedo boat that once carried Winston Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower to view the D-day fleet, a motorboat steered by the last survivor of Dunkirk (ninety-five-year-old Vic Viner), and a Maori war canoe.

The Queen, who wore a white, Swarovski crystal-studded coat and hat by her personal designer and assistant, Angela Kelly, waved and gestured at the vessels that passed, clearly delighted despite the heavy downpour. But neither she nor Camilla, who was also wearing white, could be easily spotted at a distance by the crowds. Kate was another matter. Since her husband was wearing his dashing flight lieutenant’s blue dress uniform, the Duchess of
Cambridge saw no reason to tone down her look. After talking it over with her mother, Kate selected a scarlet dress by Alexander McQueen with an eye-catching hat to match.

Inevitably, there was grumbling in some quarters that Kate was trying to upstage the Queen. “Oh Kate, what were you thinking?” asked Amanda Platell in the
Daily Mail
. “While the rest of the royal party sensibly opted for a muted palette, determined not to outshine the woman at the center of it all, the Duchess of Cambridge opted for a scarlet dress so bold and bright it just screamed: ‘Look at me!’ ” Across the pond, the
Washington Post
reported that the Diamond Jubilee Thames Pageant had “Brits seeing red over Kate Middleton’s dress.”

Kate’s fashion choice was a calculated risk—Camilla and the other royal women on board had complied with Buckingham Palace’s request that they wear white or beige. The risk, however, paid off. Echoing what appeared to be the majority sentiment, the
Telegraph
praised Kate for being the only Royal on board to “dazzle” the crowd. Even the once-critical
Daily Mail
changed its tune. The Duchess of Cambridge was “resplendent in red,” the
Mail
declared in later editions, “cutting a swath through the gloomy weather. . . . Her dress was a vibrant choice which still allowed the Queen to shine on her big day.”

In a family whose members “vie for attention every day,” said one of Prince Charles’s former advisors, Camilla “couldn’t have been happy. Every time the spotlight is on William or Kate, for that matter, it undercuts the Prince of Wales just a little bit. He feels it, and she feels it.”

The next day, the Queen had more important things on her mind. After standing on a boat in miserable weather for four hours and refusing to take a single bathroom break, Prince Philip
was hospitalized with a severe bladder infection, just six days short of his ninety-first birthday. He would miss the three-hour jubilee concert in front of Buckingham Palace starring Sir Tom Jones, Grace Jones, Stevie Wonder, Ed Sheeran, Annie Lennox, Kylie Minogue, Dame Shirley Bassey, Sir Elton John, and Sir Paul McCartney, among others.

At the end of the concert, Charles pointed out that his father was too ill to attend. But, he added, “if we shout loud enough he might just hear us in hospital.” A roar went up from the crowd of more than five hundred thousand people, who began chanting “Philip! Philip!” Camilla, standing next to Charles and the Queen, began to tear up. Elizabeth, whose stiff upper lip so rarely trembled, did, too. Moments later, all eyes, including the misty ones, turned skyward as a breathtaking fireworks display erupted over the palace.

The next day more than a million people lined the streets to wave the flag and cheer Elizabeth II as she rode in a horse-drawn carriage from a “Queen’s Luncheon” with tradesmen at Westminster Hall back to Buckingham Palace. With Philip still recuperating in the hospital, Charles convinced his mother to ride with him and Camilla in the 1902 State Landau coach.

Camilla’s new “place of pride” next to the monarch did not go unnoticed. “Once she was a pariah,” said one of Princess Diana’s close friends, journalist Richard Kay. Pointing out that the Queen once called Camilla “That Wicked Woman,” Kay now agreed that Diana’s replacement “is at the heart of the Royal Family. . . . Whichever way you look at it, hers has certainly been a remarkable transformation from scarlet woman to royal Duchess.”

Still moved by the unprecedented outpouring of affection that had been going on unabated for days, the Queen seemed
unprepared for the thunderous ovation that greeted her when she stepped out onto royal balcony. Although she had witnessed countless flyovers in her lifetime, Elizabeth also appeared more excited than ever to see World War II aircraft soar overhead, followed by the Red Arrows RAF aerobatic team painting the sky with their red, white, and blue contrails.

At one point, the Queen seemed genuinely overwhelmed. “Amazing,” she said to Charles. “Oh, my goodness, how extraordinary.” William leaned down, as if to reassure his flabbergasted grandmother. “Those cheers,” he told her, “are for you.” The Queen looked up at her grandson and gave him a wry smile.

Elizabeth was enough of a realist to know that, without the recent addition of William and Kate to the royal balcony tableau, the outpouring of love would have been markedly less effusive. What the world saw that day was what Palace officials now privately called “The Magnificent Seven”: the Queen, Philip, Charles, Camilla, William, Kate, and Harry. Of these, there was no doubt that the youthful, energetic, gracious, and charismatic Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were the vital new face of the monarchy.

They proved it again later that summer during the London Olympics. As the “Official Ambassadors” of Team GB (Great Britain), they showed up in the stands to cheer for their countrymen, and whenever Team GB won a race or scored a point, leaped to their feet and hugged each other. It was impossible to top the Queen’s performance at the opening ceremonies, however. Being picked up by Daniel Craig at Buckingham Palace and then “parachuted” into the stadium made Her Majesty “an awfully hard act to follow,” cracked Prince Harry.

Somehow, Harry managed. Between army deployments in Afghanistan, the Spare decided to spend part of August living it
up in Las Vegas. Unfortunately, what happened there didn’t stay there. Photographs of Harry frolicking nude with a young woman during a game of strip billiards were leaked by the celebrity website TMZ and were soon splashed across the pages of tabloids everywhere.

No sooner had Harry issued one of his all-too-familiar profuse apologies than Kate suddenly found herself at the center of her own media firestorm. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were in the middle of a nine-day “Jubilee Tour” of Southeast Asia and the Pacific when topless images of the Duchess were published in French and Italian magazines. The photos, taken when William and Kate were sunbathing while on holiday at a private villa in Provence, were snapped from a distance of more than five hundred yards by a paparazzo using a telephoto lens.

Kate burst into tears when she saw the less-than-flattering pictures. Furious, William immediately ordered royal lawyers to obtain an injunction against the French magazine
Closer
, which ran the images, and to lodge a criminal invasion-of-privacy complaint with French authorities. The photographer who took the photos and the editor who decided to publish them were charged, but three years later the criminal case was still wending its way through France’s notoriously slow court system.

Camilla, meanwhile, continued with the endless rounds of walkabouts, county fairs, dedications, memorials, horse races, flower shows, and charity events with and without her husband—a total of 276 official engagements in 2012. The Prince of Wales and his wife also embarked on their own Jubilee Tour that would take them to Australia, Canada, Scandinavia, and Germany.

Although that year Kate would ramp up her game somewhat, managing 111 appearances on behalf of the Crown, neither she
nor Camilla came close to matching the indefatigable monarch (425 official engagements in her Jubilee year), her husband (325 engagements), or the hardest-working Royal in modern history, Charles. The Prince of Wales proved himself to be the Energizer Bunny of the Royal Family, making no fewer than 592 official appearances in 2012—nearly a dozen every single week.

Charles often boasted that there had never been a defined role for the Prince of Wales other than waiting for his predecessor to die. His was a job, the Prince of Wales liked to say, that he simply made up as he went along. In addition to raising more than $175 million annually for his personal charities, the Prince of Wales was the patron of another 350 charities and organizations, extending the reach of his influence across the globe.

Interested in everything from architecture, education, sustainable farming, climate change, and urban planning to meditation, Eastern philosophies, and alternative medicine, Charles expressed his opinions in countless speeches and long, rambling letters to government officials. These letters, known as the “Black Spider Memos” because they were written in Charles’s distinctively spidery script, periodically drew criticism because the monarch—and by extension the heir apparent—was by tradition supposed to be politically neutral.

Unlike his mother, however, Charles did not hesitate to express his opinions to cabinet ministers and politicians in the strongest terms possible. “These letters were not merely routine and noncontroversial,” Charles’s senior press advisor Mark Bolland conceded, “but contained his views on political matters and political issues.” According to Bolland, Charles frequently “denounced the elected leaders of other countries in extreme terms.”

He did more than just write letters. In 1999, Charles infuriated
Tony Blair’s government by boycotting a banquet in honor of Chinese President Jiang Zemin in protest of China’s occupation of Tibet. In a speech at Oxford in 2010, the Prince of Wales urged the world to follow Islamic “spiritual principles” in order to protect the environment. He based this, he said, on his own “extensive study” of the Koran, “which teaches there is no separation between man and nature.” Needless to say, the comments—coming as they did from the head of the Church of England—raised eyebrows in Parliament, and at Buckingham Palace.

The Queen tried to rein her son in, but to no avail. Charles kept writing his Black Spider Memos at the rate of eighteen hundred or more a year, and pledged to break tradition by becoming a much more politically involved monarch once it was his turn on the throne. For now, he proudly called himself the Royal Family’s “chief dissident” and, more poetically, “the Meddlesome Prince.”

In the meantime, he would continue running in place, albeit at a frenetic pace. Taking on one massive social problem after another, Charles frantically searched for expert advice wherever he could find it, and then pitted these advisors against each other. Notoriously thin-skinned, he routinely lashed out over even the mildest criticism, leaving housemaids and senior officials quaking.

In addition to his epic flashes of temper, Charles was also given to long periods of sulking—usually in response to perceived slights or his own lingering feelings of inadequacy. “If you spent your entire life with people deferring to you just because of who your mother is,” said a former aide, “you’d wonder if you truly deserved any praise at all. To this day, Prince Charles is a deeply insecure person.”

As a result, wrote Royal watcher Catherine Mayer, “the court
of the heir to the throne crackles with tension.” Clarence House was so rife with intrigue, in fact, that insiders soon took to calling it “Wolf Hall”—a sly reference to Hilary Mantel’s chilling account of duplicity and ambition run amok in the Court of Henry VIII.

A few of those closest to the Prince of Wales claimed to understand why he was so driven to succeed at so many things (“He only knows how to go full-tilt”), and why, when the Queen seemed so direct and uncomplicated, her son’s personality was unsettlingly mercurial. “He’s trying to save the world, dammit!” joked Elizabeth Buchanan, Charles’s former private secretary. “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen!” As it happened, Buchanan had been through her own baptism by fire at Clarence House. At one point Camilla, apparently fearing that the Prince of Wales had become too dependent on Buchanan, demanded that Charles fire her. He not only refused, but later promoted her to the top spot on his staff.

That was a rare exception to the rule, for Camilla nearly always prevailed. As his chief advisor and biggest cheerleader, she could raise his spirits and bolster his confidence with a quip or a trenchant remark directed at his critics. “Camilla soothes things,” said Anne Glenconner, a former lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret and the widow of Colin Tennant, the flamboyant Scottish aristocrat who turned Mustique into a high society playground. Equally important in her relationship with Charles, Camilla does something he rarely does: She “anticipates what could go wrong.”

So did the Queen, who for years had gradually, almost imperceptibly, shifted more and more responsibility to her son. Prince Charles was given more access to top-secret government papers (the Queen’s dreaded boxes of state are red, Charles’s green), presided at more investitures (the Queen never gave an honoree
more than forty seconds; Charles could chat for up to a minute), and accepted more ambassadors’ credentials. Most significantly, Charles began holding his own regular audiences with the Prime Minister and various Commonwealth leaders.