Game of Crowns: Elizabeth, Camilla, Kate, and the Throne (34 page)

For a second year in a row, William and Kate broke with holiday tradition by forsaking Christmas dinner at Sandringham to spend the holidays primarily with the Middletons. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge attended church with the royal family sans George (“He’s too noisy,” Mummy explained), then headed back to Anmer House to host Kate’s family. As much as this rankled the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall, the Queen waxed philosophical. “Deciding how to divide time between the two families,” she said, “it’s a difficult problem, especially when you have two small children.”

The Queen realizes more than anyone that the current situation is unique, and is planning accordingly. That is all I will say.

—A SENIOR COURTIER, WHEN ASKED IF THE QUEEN HAD RULED OUT ABDICATING

P
rince George’s arrival marked only the second time in history that three generations of direct royal heirs were alive while there was a reigning monarch on the throne. The last time this occurred was during the reign of Queen Victoria, when Edward VII, George V, and brothers Edward VIII and George VI were all waiting in line to wear the crown.

Charles was still waiting. At sixty-seven, he was already three years older than the oldest person ever to assume the throne—William IV, who succeeded George IV in 1830. On September 9, 2015, the Queen surpassed Victoria’s reign of 63 years, 216 days, becoming the longest-reigning British monarch in history. The distinction, she said with a sly smile, was “not one to which I have ever aspired.”

Yet there was a good chance she would reign longer still. Much, much longer. Her mother lived to be 101, and she was active and
alert almost to the very last day of her life. At ninety, the Queen could live another decade or more. Were she to live as long as the Queen Mother, Charles would become king at seventy-eight, and Camilla his Queen at seventy-nine. If Charles, in turn, lived to be as old as Prince Philip, William and Kate would both be well past sixty by the time William assumed the throne.

For years the Queen privately brought up the notion of retiring, only to dismiss it out of hand. “Oh, that’s something I can’t do,” she once told former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey. “I am going to carry on to the end.” Margaret Rhodes believed her cousin the Queen saw her duty to the British people as “something so deep and special” that she would fulfill it “until the day she dies.”

Certainly the British people were overwhelmingly convinced that the Queen would never consider abdicating—although there were moments when they wavered in that belief. In December 2014, it was widely rumored that the Queen would announce her decision to retire during her annual Christmas broadcast, the contents of which were always kept secret. Speculation in the press ran rampant after Britain’s betting industry suspending wagering on the Queen’s abdication after a series of “highly specific” bets were placed indicating that someone with inside knowledge of the Queen’s Christmas broadcast script might be seeking to cash in on her decision to step down.

She didn’t make the announcement, of course. But the Queen did make it clear to members of her inner circle that she would voluntarily abdicate in the event of some debilitating event—like dementia, or a stroke. In the event she was no longer able to make that conscious decision, it would be made for her under the Regency Act of 1937. If any three of the following people agreed
that the Queen could no longer do the job—the consort of the sovereign (Prince Philip), the Lord Chancellor, the Speaker of the House of Commons, the Lord Chief Justice of England and the Master of the Rolls—then Charles would become Regent. Given Elizabeth’s advanced age, said one of her senior advisors, “we’re definitely dusting off the Regency Act and taking a fresh look at it.”

Were the Regency Act to be invoked, Charles would essentially become king in all but name. It had been two centuries since Britain’s last regency, when George III’s worsening mental illness made it impossible for him to fulfill his duties. His son, the future George IV, assumed his father’s full duties and ruled as Regent from 181l until 1820—England’s Regency Period.

But even if the Queen remained in good health for years—and there was no indication that she wouldn’t—there were currents of change that she could not ignore. Over an eighteen-month period in 2013 and 2014, there was a flurry of abdications across Europe: In April, 75-year-old Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands handed the crown to her son, Prince Willem-Alexander, 45. Three months later, 79-year-old Albert II of Belgium abdicated in favor of his son, Crown Prince Philippe, 53. The following year, after repeatedly insisting à la Queen Elizabeth that abdication for him was “not an option,” Spain’s 76-year-old King Juan Carlos shocked his countrymen by abruptly handing over the crown to his son Prince Felipe, 46. “A new generation must be at the forefront,” Juan Carlos explained, “younger people with new energies.”

Nothing so rattled the British monarch, however, as the events in Rome. “No, no,” were the Queen’s words when she was told that Pope Benedict XVI, who was one year younger than Elizabeth,
had abdicated. “It cannot be! I don’t understand.” Neither did the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics. After all, there hadn’t been a papal abdication in six hundred years.

The Queen did not have to look back quite so far. She was a girl of ten when an abdication thrust her own reluctant, stammering father onto the throne. Certainly there was something to be said for controlling her own destiny—for leaving on her own terms, rather than waiting for the Regency Act to be invoked by others. The idea of living out her nonagenarian years as Dowager Queen also had a certain appeal. Just as the Queen “always sought her mother’s advice and approval,” said a former lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother, “Charles will always defer to his mother, whatever his title.”

“Does he want the job? Yes, of course he wants it. It’s what he’s been training for all his life,” a former advisor said. “Does it bother him that his mother has to die for him to get it? Of course, but she doesn’t
have
to die for that to happen, does she?” In late 1998, Charles and Camilla both sensed that the furor over Diana’s death had weakened the monarch and left an opening. He rashly allowed his press secretary, Mark Bolland, to leak the story that the Prince of Wales would be “privately delighted” if the Queen abdicated. Furious, Elizabeth summoned her son to Buckingham Palace, demanded that he explain, and then insisted on—and got—a profuse apology.

Charles sputtered when asked during a television interview if he thought about what it would mean for him when his mother died. “It is better not to have to think too much about it,” he said. “I think about it a bit, but it’s much better not. This is something that, you know, if it comes to it, and regrettably it comes as the
result of the death of your parent, which is, you know, not so nice, to say the least.”

Now both Charles and his mother were forced to think about it—a lot. “It is not quite true that the Queen has not entertained the thought,” said the BBC’s Andrew Marr. “She has discussed abdication privately with loyal and very senior figures.” Three of those “loyal and very senior figures”—Baron Fellowes, Sir Robin Janvrin, and her current private secretary, Christopher Geidt—had already begun counseling the Queen on the very question of how and when to pass the torch.

Heir to his mother’s particular brand of magic, husband to one of the most admired young women in the world, father of the world’s two most famous and undeniably adorable toddlers, William was the overwhelming choice of the British people to become the next monarch. But Diana’s devout wish of bypassing Charles altogether was impossible. No one could prevent the Prince of Wales from asserting his right to the crown.

In the halls of Buckingham Palace, it had long been accepted that Charles would be a place holder for the man who would carry the monarchy into the future. But even if he reigned as a transitional figure for a decade or perhaps a few years longer, that still gave King Charles III ample opportunity to make his mark on history.

One secret plan, first hatched in 2010, called for the Queen to retire (a far more palatable word than abdicate) so that her son might reign for a limited time before stepping down in favor of Prince William. There seemed little doubt that, if the Queen and Charles both agreed to her abdication, Parliament and the fifteen other nations that share the British sovereign would go along.

One nagging question remained. If Charles reigned for a specified time—say fifteen years—what would he become after he stepped down to make way for William? He could not revert to being the Prince of Wales or the Duke of Cornwall, since those titles are held by the eldest son of the monarch. He and Camilla would also lose their income from the Duchy of Cornwall—a staggering $45 million annually.

These details had yet to be worked out, but were far from insurmountable. “Titles can be revived, and rules changed,” a longtime courtier said, “if the future of the monarchy is at stake. I can assure you Prince Charles, no matter what he ends up being called, is not about to starve.”

In ways both subtle and surprisingly direct, the Queen was sending the message that her retirement was imminent—if not around the time of her ninetieth birthday celebration in 2016, then after the death of the Duke of Edinburgh. For sixty-four years, he had dutifully walked several paces behind his wife, arms folded behind his back as if he were pacing the deck of a ship—just as he had when he served with distinction in the navy during World War II. “My job first, second, and last,” he once said, “is never to let the Queen down.”

Perhaps. But Philip was known for his temper, his impatience, his often brusque demeanor—and his public gaffes. “Damn fool question!” Philip snapped when a BBC reporter politely asked the Queen if she was enjoying her stay in Paris. When he met Sir Michael Bishop, then chairman of Britain’s Channel 4 television network, Philip said, “So you’re responsible for the kind of crap Channel 4 produces!”

With the press looking on, he once asked a Scottish driving instructor, “How do you keep your natives off the booze long
enough to get them through the test?” On a separate trip to Scotland, he drew the ire of the Indian community when he said a fuse box looked “as though it was put in by an Indian.” Confronted about the comment, he stuttered, “I meant to say cowboys. I just got my cowboys and Indians mixed up.”

“Aren’t most of you descended from pirates?” he inquired when visiting the Cayman Islands. On a trip to Australia, he asked an aboriginal leader, “Do you still throw spears at each other?” To the president of Nigeria, who met the Prince wearing traditional dress: “You look like you’re ready for bed.”

While touring China, Prince Philip told a visiting British student, “If you stay here much longer you’ll go home with slitty eyes.” The Queen’s spouse went on to declare Beijing “ghastly”—the same word he publicly used to describe any number of industrial cities and suburban towns he visited in England over the years. At a ceremony for his Duke of Edinburgh youth awards program, Philip told the audience that “young people are the same as they always were—just as ignorant.” When a student parking attendant failed to recognize him during a tour of Cambridge University, Philip blurted out, “You bloody silly fool!”

The Duke of Edinburgh’s lack of tact was never more in evidence than when the Queen asked a Northwest London Army cadet nearly blinded in an IRA bombing how much he could see. “Not a lot,” Prince Philip interjected, pointing to the young man’s chest, “judging by that tie.” Similarly, when he met a group of children from the British Deaf Association who were standing near a Caribbean steel drum band, Philip declared, “If you’re near that music it’s no wonder you’re deaf.” The wheelchair-bound resident of a London nursing home scarcely knew how to react when Philip asked bluntly, “Do people trip over you?”

Not even his children were exempt. Of Princess Anne’s love of horses, Philip commented, “If it doesn’t fart or eat hay, she isn’t interested.”

Notwithstanding his famously prickly nature, the Queen still relied heavily on her husband’s advice and support. “He has, quite simply, been my strength and stay all these years,” she once tried to explain. “And I, his whole family, and this and many other countries, owe him a debt greater than he would ever claim or we shall ever know.” According to her cousin Margaret Rhodes, Elizabeth and Philip remained very much in love. “She’s always adored him,” Rhodes said. “She never looked at anyone else. She was smitten from the start.”

As he approached his ninety-fifth birthday in June 2016—within days of the Queen’s ninetieth birthday Trooping the Colour ceremony—Prince Philip was described as being in “robust health” in spite of several recent scares. Mentally, the Duke of Edinburgh was, said his equerry, “as sharp as ever.” By way of maintaining their mental agility and staying informed, both Philip and the Queen had become ardent Googlers. If either had a question about something, “they both go straight to their iPads.”

The Queen, however, was nothing if not a realist. In late September 2015, she let it be known to her staff that, after the death of her husband, she intended to leave Buckingham Palace and make Balmoral her primary residence. At about the same time, the Queen’s and Charles’s communications departments were quietly merged under the control of one of the Prince’s most senior courtiers—“another clear indication,” said the
Times
, “that major changes are afoot.”

The sovereign herself said as much when she bestowed a second knighthood on Sir Christopher Geidt, architect of both
Her Majesty’s approaching “retirement” and the hand-off to the next generation. In words that went largely unnoticed at first, the Queen’s citation explained that Geidt was being honored for forging “
a new approach to constitutional matters
 . . . and the preparation for the
transition to a change of reign
.”

“It was a surprising admission,” declared the
Daily Mail
, which called the developments “hugely significant . . . the succession is rarely, if ever, talked about in official terms. But behind the Palace gates, preparations are being made.” One royal confidante called it “the first step to bringing Charles to the throne.”