Game of Crowns: Elizabeth, Camilla, Kate, and the Throne (6 page)

Although the ceilings are twelve feet high, it is roughly the size of a bedroom in any suburban American home—about sixteen by fourteen feet. The furnishings can only be described as spartan. Instead of a king-sized bed or even the more obviously appropriate queen-sized bed, Elizabeth has always preferred to sleep alone in a double bed—granted, a bed surrounded on all sides by a curtain. There are also two small nightstands, and a sturdy, functional, but undistinguished mahogany dresser.

The chambermaid maneuvers the heavy tray onto one of the small bedside tables and the Queen, who unhesitatingly describes herself as “a real morning person,” chatters brightly about the weather. On the tray is a tea service for one: two small silver pots, Royal Crown Derby bone china teacup and saucer decorated in one of Her Majesty’s favorite floral patterns, a napkin bearing the monogram EIIR (Elizabeth II Regent), and a few biscuits.

Her Majesty always serves herself this all-important first cup of Darjeeling or occasionally Earl Grey (two lumps of sugar with milk trucked in fresh from the royal herd at Windsor Castle), then savors it while listening to the news on BBC Radio 4. The maid throws open the bedroom curtains, then draws the Queen’s morning bath.

The Queen, who has a fondness for knee-length, floral-print Liberty of London nightgowns, puts on her favorite chenille robe and pads to the bathroom in bare feet. While she bathes, the maid lays out her wardrobe for the day—all preselected and tagged by her dresser and confidante Angela Kelly, who also chooses which one of the Queen’s two hundred purses will best go with her outfit. What is actually in the Queen’s handbag, along with those magnets for picking up stray pins that might injure her corgis? Since she routinely powders her nose at the dinner table—a practice that some people find surprising—the Queen always carries a treasured metal makeup case Philip made for her as a wedding gift. She also carries lipstick—in 1952 Elizabeth II commissioned her own shade called “the Balmoral Lipstick” to match her coronation robes—which she applies frequently throughout the day. In addition to a small selection of family snapshots and a number of good luck charms from her children—the Queen is unapologetically superstitious—Her Majesty’s handbag includes a small tube of mints, several crossword puzzles to while away the time spent traveling from one appearance to another, doggie treats, a fountain pen (she refuses to use a ballpoint), sunglasses, reading glasses, a small mirror, a diary and address book—and often a tiny camera she might suddenly whip out to take photos of other world leaders. To keep from having to place her purse on the floor, the Queen also carries a small white suction cup with a hook on it. When the occasion arises, she sticks the suction cup to the underside of a table and hangs her purse from it. “Very handy, don’t you think?” she said to one startled guest at a luncheon in Yorkshire.

Almost as revealing is what she
doesn’t
carry in her purse: credit cards, car keys, cash, or a passport—she has never required one
because, as the Queen, she issues all UK passports. Every other member of the Royal Family, including Prince Philip and Charles, requires a passport to travel abroad.

At eight-thirty, Elizabeth joins Prince Philip for breakfast in the first-floor dining room overlooking the palace gardens. Often Philip, who gets up an hour earlier than his wife, has breakfast alone in his own private dining room down the hall. (Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh maintain separate dining rooms, sitting rooms, bedrooms, and bathrooms.) But today he is here to wish his wife of sixty-eight years happy birthday with a peck on both cheeks.

The Queen’s breakfast menu rarely varies: Special K or oatmeal brought to the table in Tupperware containers, crustless whole wheat toast with orange marmalade, a single boiled egg, and small bowls of prunes, apricots, and macadamia nuts. While Elizabeth sips her tea, she scans the papers piled on her breakfast table. On top is her favorite publication, the
Racing Post
, followed by the
Daily Mail
, the
Daily Express
, the
Mirror
, the
Daily Telegraph
, the
Times
, and
Thoroughbred Owner and Breeder
.

She reads them all. “I don’t read the tabloids,” the Duke of Edinburgh said. “I glance at one. I reckon one’s enough. I can’t cope with them. But the Queen reads every bloody paper she can lay her hands on!”

Philip does not even attempt to speak to the Queen when she is immersed in her racing results and the day’s tipsheets. He drinks his black coffee—the Prince is not a fan of tea in the morning—and proceeds to down a full English breakfast of fried eggs, fried mushrooms, bacon, sausages, scones, and oatcakes with honey. At one point, he breaks a tiny piece off a scone, crumbles it, walks
over to the window, and places the crumbs in a bird feeder just outside the window.

At 9:00 a.m., the Queen’s Piper marches to his customary spot in the garden just beneath the dining-room window and begins to play a strained rendition of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “People Will Say We’re in Love” from the 1943 Broadway musical
Oklahoma!
It has been one of the Queen’s favorite tunes since she was a teenager.

Elizabeth puts her papers down and walks to the window. To Major Rodgers’s undisguised delight, both she and Philip are smiling down at him. Unfortunately, the Queen’s Piper cannot hear her gamely humming along, trying to keep up with his wheezing bagpipes.

Oklahoma!
opened on the West End in 1947, and she and Philip saw it when they were dating. According to Elizabeth’s governess and friend Marion Crawford (who, like the Queen Mother, never stopped calling her young charge “Lilibet”), “People Will Say We’re in Love” was Elizabeth and Philip’s song. “After he started taking her out,” Crawford remembered, “Lilibet would often ask the band at restaurants where they dined to play ‘People Will Say We’re in Love’ for her.” Elizabeth and Philip fell in love while slow dancing to the tune, and were married that November. At the time, long before Charles and Diana and William and Kate, theirs was the Wedding of the Century.

For a few blissfully free moments, Elizabeth is lost in her memories. Such moments of queenly reverie are rare; Her Majesty’s hectic schedule aside, she has never been one for introspection. But since the death of the Queen Mother, friends and royal household staff alike have noticed what her cousin Margaret
Rhodes called “a change in the Queen’s mood . . . a kind of serenity. I think in a funny way, perhaps, the death of the Queen Mother had quite a huge effect on the Queen . . . in a way that she could come into her own as the head of the family and as the senior royal lady.”

If the Queen felt more than a little intimidated by her mother, Elizabeth was always—to borrow Diana’s nickname for her mother-in-law—“Top Lady” in everyone else’s eyes. Now, as the world celebrates her ninetieth birthday, she knows precious time is running out. The Queen may not share Camilla’s night terrors about what lies ahead for the monarchy once she is gone, or Kate’s deceptively guileless sense of youthful optimism—in short, the firm if unstated belief that William will prevail, and sooner rather than later. But the Queen is keenly aware that to preserve the institution that she has embodied longer than anyone, hard choices must be made—and that royal egos will be badly bruised in the process.

The Queen’s Piper ends with a flourish, then marches off. Her Majesty claps in appreciation, then turns from the window and heads back down the hall. As she walks toward her bedroom, she beckons to her “moving carpet” of corgis and dorgis to come along. Willow, Holly, Vulcan, and Candy all swarm at their mistress’s feet, yapping happily.

It is time to get dressed for the Trooping the Colour parade, and for all the celebrations that will follow. Perhaps more than at any time in her life, she knows who she is, what she represents, the power she still has to stir the world’s imagination, and what she must do with that power. She also knows that, after spending more time on the world stage than anyone in history, male or
female, she has achieved an almost mythic status that transcends mere fame.

Milestone events like this official birthday, overflowing with pageantry and pomp, are an important part of the royal equation. “I must be seen,” Elizabeth has always been fond of saying, “to be believed.”

Let us not take ourselves too seriously. None of us has a monopoly on wisdom.

—THE QUEEN

HIGH IN A FIG TREE IN KENYA

FEBRUARY 6, 1952

Clad in safari jacket and jeans, binoculars firmly in hand, she climbed to the observation platform shortly before dawn and waited for the rhinos to come. This was Princess Elizabeth’s long-delayed honeymoon trip to Africa, and while her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, preferred to sleep in, she was not about to miss the sight of wild game gathering at the watering hole to drink some fifty feet below. In the meantime, she and Philip’s private secretary, Michael Parker, gazed in wonder at the sight of the equatorial sun beginning its ascent on the horizon.

Just as everything began to turn an eerie, shimmering pink, a white eagle darted out of the sky. For a moment, it seemed as if it might dive down and attack Parker and the royal Princess, but instead it just made lazy circles above them before flying off
toward the sun. “That was very strange,” Elizabeth said at the time, unaware that it was at that moment that her father died at Sandringham—and she became queen at age twenty-five.

“Because of where we were,” said Pamela Hicks, a lady-in-waiting on the trip, “we were almost the last people in the world to know.” Their hotel in Kenya, Treetops, was nothing more than a series of structures built among the branches of a giant fig tree smack in the middle of the jungle. It was considered too dangerous for most tourists, who ran the risk of being attacked by wild animals coming to the salt lick at the base of the tree. It was also deep in rebel territory, and would actually be burned down during the bloody Mau Mau uprisings a year later.

It would be more than four hours before the news reached Parker, who told Philip immediately. “It will be the most appalling shock,” said Philip, who believed like everyone else at the time that the King’s lung cancer treatment had been successful and he was on the road to recovery. King George had actually spent an enjoyable day shooting pheasant at Sandringham, and after a pleasant, upbeat dinner with his wife and Elizabeth’s sister Margaret, went to bed at 10:30 p.m. Several hours later, however, he suffered a pulmonary embolism and died in his sleep. He was fifty-six.

The BBC was already broadcasting the news when Philip walked into Elizabeth’s hotel room and broke the news to her. The Prince would recall that she looked “pale and worried,” but did not cry. Philip took his wife through the garden down to the nearby Sagana River, where they walked slowly up and down the riverbank while he spoke words of comfort and reassurance to her.

Not long after, she was sitting bolt upright at the desk in her hotel room, pen in hand, while Philip sat on the sofa, calmly
reading the
Times
. Whenever anyone in their party expressed their condolences, Elizabeth apologized for having to cut the trip short. “I’m so sorry we’ve got to go back,” she said. “It’s ruining everybody’s plans.”

When Elizabeth’s private secretary, Martin Charteris, asked what name she wished to be known by as monarch, she looked puzzled. “My own, of course—what else?” she replied, apparently forgetting that her own father’s real name was Albert (“Bertie” to his family).

Later, on the twenty-four-hour flight home to London, Elizabeth would leave her seat several times to cry privately in the bathroom. But for now, she could not afford the luxury of self-pity. Whatever feelings of grief she had, Parker observed, were buried “deep, deep inside her.” Instead, sitting at her desk suspended in a fig tree in Kenya, she jotted down notes, fired off cables, and wrote letters in her loopy script—seizing her destiny, as Lord Charteris put it, “with both hands.”

No one knew what to expect—not even the then Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who wept at the news of the King’s passing and wondered aloud if Elizabeth was up to the task. “I don’t even
know
her,” he complained. “She’s only a child!”

Yet Elizabeth had already proved she was no pushover. When Philip insisted that their children be given his family name—Mountbatten (the Anglicized form of “Battenberg”)—Elizabeth followed Churchill’s advice and stood up to her husband, officially proclaiming that they would carry on the Windsor name. “Are you telling me,” he demanded in front of the Prime Minister, “that I am the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his children? I’m nothing but a bloody amoeba!”

Philip had reason to be particularly sensitive when it came to
surnames. The Duke had been given his mother’s Battenberg family name by default. It could have been much worse. Princess Alice of Battenberg, a schizophrenic who was once committed to a mental institution, could have left her son with the unwieldy Teutonic surname Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg. To avoid ruffling the feathers of their English cousins after World War I and during the years leading up to World War II, it was agreed that Elizabeth’s future husband should technically have no surname at all, and simply be known as Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark.

Philip’s wife embraced her fate with a fervor that surprised even the most ardent monarchists. She was, after all, the young mother of two: Charles was three when she became queen, his sister Anne not yet two. Andrew would arrive in 1960 and youngest child Edward in 1964. Lady Airlie, a close friend of Elizabeth’s grandmother, Queen Mary, echoed the sentiments of many when she urged the new queen’s handlers “not to kill the poor little girl” by loading her down with too many royal engagements. Even the Queen’s physicians urged her to avoid all but a handful of important engagements and devote most of her time to raising her children.

Elizabeth, ever the dutiful daughter, would have none of it. As a way to further suppress her grief and to honor her father’s memory, she threw herself into her new job. From this point on, the mother Charles had known would become little more than a phantom—a distant, formal figure who treated him with chilly detachment.