Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Three of the biggest countries in the Commonwealth could replace the British sovereign with their own head of state whenever the crown changes hands. Australia, where polls have long shown substantial numbers favoring a republic, would likely go first, possibly followed by New Zealand. Unlike the two Antipodes with their own historical traditions separate from Britain, Canada has a greater natural affinity for the monarchy, which helps create an identity distinct from its powerful neighbor to the south. But there is a strong republican strain in Canada as well. The Queen is a realist and has said that each nation should decide its own destiny. Her main concern is that if they become republics they remain in the Commonwealth.

  AN UNDERCURRENT TO the speculation about Charles as king is that he is destined to be a transitional figure with a short reign before the succession of his more popular son, Prince William. There is a saying that a strong sovereign must either be young and beautiful, or old and venerable; the Queen through her long reign has managed to be both. If Charles gets the venerable part right, he will be judged a success. But it is William that monarchists count on to keep the dynasty strong in the new millennium. The Palace is fully aware that the monarchy’s future depends not only on reaching young people but emphasizing its own next generation.

  Public opinion polls in recent years have shown that a majority would like to see William as the next king rather than Charles. An ICM research poll in Britain at the end of 2010 found 64 percent in favor of William and only 19 percent for Charles. When William visited Australia and New Zealand in January 2010 on his first official overseas tour, he attracted larger than anticipated crowds and boosted the popularity of the monarchy. He dressed in open-neck shirts and sneakers, and he endeared himself at a children’s hospital by getting down on his knees with toddlers. Before his visit, polls consistently showed 60 percent favoring a republic in Australia; afterward one survey showed that number had dropped to 44 percent.

  Just over a year later, William was back Down Under, this time to console victims of natural disasters in both countries, where his empathy and genuine manner struck a chord. “My grandmother once said grief is the price you pay for love,” he told the residents of Christchurch, New Zealand, who had endured a calamitous earthquake. “You are an inspiration to all people.” “He came, he saw, he charmed their bloody socks off,” wrote the Herald Sun in Queensland, Australia.

  But succession to the next in line is preordained, with no provision for skipping a generation. Even if Charles were to take the throne and abdicate immediately in favor of King William V, there would be numerous complications. A law would have to be passed by the British Parliament, and the legislatures in the other fifteen realms would need to agree. The resulting debate could have the unintended consequence of tipping some of those countries toward republics, and of igniting republican forces in Britain to push for a presidency to replace the monarchy. If William became king while his father was still alive, Charles could not return to being Prince of Wales and Duke of Cornwall, titles that are reserved for the eldest son of the sovereign. He would likely lose the resources of the Duchy of Cornwall, which would revert to the crown until William’s first child reaches the age of eighteen. Deciding on a title for an erstwhile king would be equally problematic.

  “There is no question in Prince William’s mind that the Prince of Wales will be the next monarch,” said a senior royal adviser. “He has no desire to climb the ladder of kingship before his time.” The courtier added that William is “very close to his father and incredibly supportive of him and his work as the Prince of Wales. Both of them will let nature take its course.”

  Yet the juxtaposition of an aging heir to the throne with his vibrant young successor inevitably sets up the possibility of upstaging, however unintentional. Simply by being himself, William has become a “people’s prince,” and a magnet for publicity. An important part of his appeal is that he is half Spencer, the pure English bloodline. He represents a powerful combination of good looks and tragedy, but without a trace of self-pity.

  Handsome and tall like his mother (at six foot three, he towers over the rest of the Windsors), he embodies her magic in his informal and accessible personality, irreverent humor, and high-wattage smile. Like his father, he engages people with a steady gaze and speaks with poise, conviction, and sensitivity. He lacks the deep-seated insecurities and attention-craving impulses of Diana and the old-fashioned formality and awkward mannerisms of Charles. He has his mother’s soulful eyes, and his father’s thinning hair. He projects confidence without arrogance, although he shows a streak of willfulness that can be traced to both parents. “The future could not be more optimistic,” said Malcolm Ross. “William is stunning, very sensible, incredibly polite, and very, very good with people.”

  In the years following their mother’s death, both sons have grown closer to their “Pop,” who has been an engaged and affectionate parent. “We get along really well, Harry and I and my father,” William said at age twenty-two. “We’re a very close family. There are disagreements, obviously, as all families have and when they are, they are big disagreements. But when they’re happy times we have a really good time.”

  William has been schooled in the British institutions that he needs to understand as an heir to the throne. As was the case with Elizabeth II and Charles, much of William’s royal education has come from observing and developing an instinctive feel for what is proper for a monarch to do. “He learns a lot by osmosis,” said one of his father’s senior advisers. “It is an unusual situation to have three generations. There is an inevitable tension, but they are all quite close. Communication among the offices is much better coordinated than it used to be.”

  William seemed ready to leave the Household Cavalry at the end of 2008 to join the “Firm” full-time. But with his father’s concurrence, he unexpectedly decided to sign on for five years with the Royal Air Force and train as a search-and-rescue helicopter pilot. Both William and Harry, who gained great confidence by qualifying as an Apache helicopter pilot, take pride in their professional expertise. “They don’t want to be Hello magazine princes,” said a senior Palace adviser.

  Working on Anglesey island in a remote part of northwest Wales offered William the added benefit of preserving a quasi-normal life for as long as possible—something that was denied his father. After Charles was named Prince of Wales at age ten, he had to become a little adult as a young teenager, when he was pushed out to do royal duties. Even at Cambridge he was called “Sir.” “With William and Harry we are easing into that,” said a Clarence House adviser in 2010. “Now they are Prince William and Prince Harry, but not yet ‘Sir’ or ‘Your Royal Highness.’ They don’t want that yet. Maybe when they leave the military they will have to be that, but not until.”

  Although their jobs in the armed forces mean their royal duties are only part-time, the princes are nevertheless assuming a higher profile. In 2009 they used a six-figure bequest from their late mother to endow their own charitable foundation. Robin Janvrin, their grandmother’s trusted former courtier, was appointed as chairman of the trustees. At twenty-seven and twenty-five, William’s and Harry’s collaboration signaled not only their closeness but also their long-term commitment to public service. They set up their own private office in St. James’s Palace with a private secretary and press secretary.

  Even more significant was the Queen’s assertiveness in personally recruiting a seasoned diplomat, David Manning, to serve as a mentor to the princes, William in particular. Known for his keen intelligence and sound judgment, as well as his experience as Britain’s ambassador to the United States and Israel, Manning is widely regarded as a “safe pair of hands.” “He is not only wise,” said Charles Anson, “but he doesn’t act in self-interest, a quality that is highly valued in the household.” When William visited Australia and New Zealand in 2010 and 2011, Manning came along, and his guidance contributed to the young prince’s success.

  Several days before Christmas in 2009,
William spent a freezing night “sleeping rough,” as he put it, with homeless teenagers in an alley near London’s Blackfriars Bridge. The overnight was organized by the Centrepoint charity, where he followed his mother’s footsteps to become a patron. William went incognito in a hooded sweatshirt and knit cap, and his easy rapport with far less fortunate contemporaries was apparent. His purpose, he said afterward, was to show how poverty, substance abuse, and mental illness contribute to the homeless problem. “These kinds of events are much more fulfilling to me than dressing up in a suit,” he said.

  The challenge for William will be to find the sort of balance that his grandparents mastered early: to project a freshness and glamour without succumbing to the allure of celebrity. He will need to embrace serious and often boring routines even as he experiences the satisfactions of inspiring people, doing good works, and exploring the world. As the first heir to the throne brought up to blend in with his contemporaries rather than believe he was different from everyone else, he will need to learn how to be “ordinary” in a way that preserves regal dignity. During his first trip to Australia he crossed into undignified ordinary territory when he was bantering with a group of rap musicians and blurted out, “I had the piss taken out of me for my taste in music.”

  The yearning for William has been heightened by the addition of Kate Middleton, whose natural beauty and sophisticated style evoke Diana, but in a more demure manner reminiscent of Jacqueline Kennedy. The romance began when they were undergraduates at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Away from the prying eyes of the paparazzi they fell in love and lived together, sharing such mundane chores as shopping at the supermarket and doing the dishes. Her advantages were modest, but important: a good education at the prestigious Marlborough College boarding school and an upbringing in a tightly knit and nurturing family with a sister and a brother and happily married parents. Michael and Carole Middleton achieved the ultimate middle-class dream by leaving their jobs as an airplane dispatcher and flight attendant to build a prosperous mail order business creating party products for busy mothers. William grew close to Kate’s parents, who were “loving and caring.”

  After eight years of tabloid speculation, their engagement announcement on November 16, 2010, came first on Twitter, followed by the Queen’s Facebook page. When the two twenty-eight-year-olds appeared together in the splendor of the Entrée Room at St. James’s Palace, they were as warm as they were dazzling, a marked contrast to Charles and Diana’s uneasy debut nearly three decades earlier.

  Elizabeth II and Philip were “absolutely delighted” by William’s choice. The Queen had approved of the match from afar, but had actually spent little time with Catherine, as the Palace instantly began referring to her. They had met several times, but always in groups. Their first encounter was at the wedding of Princess Anne’s son, Peter Phillips, at St. George’s Chapel at Windsor in May 2008, when the Queen came over and “had a little chat.” Prince Charles said he was “thrilled” on hearing of the engagement and joked, “They have been practicing long enough!” David Cameron heard the news in a cabinet meeting and announced that it was met with “a great cheer” and a “banging of the table” by everyone in the room.

  Both inside and outside the royal family, the consensus was that a well-grounded, middle-class British girl, the first future queen to be a university graduate, would be good news for the Windsors. After all the Queen’s heartaches over her children in the 1980s and 1990s, she accepted with equanimity the less conventional choices made by the next generation, including marriage to middle-class commoners, which had become the rule for the royal family.

  While Princess Anne’s daughter, Zara Phillips, was a student at Gordonstoun, she turned up at age seventeen with a metal stud in her tongue, and later fell in love with Yorkshire native Mike Tindall, a professional rugby player described as a “big, beer-loving lug” whose misshapen nose had been broken eight times. The Queen didn’t look askance when the couple lived together for five years before announcing their engagement, nor did she object when Zara’s brother, Peter, lived with his future wife, Autumn Kelly, for two years before they were married. Kelly was a Canadian management consultant who had studied Mandarin and Japanese history at McGill University and worked as a barmaid to pay her tuition. When the Phillipses’ daughter, Savannah, was born in December 2010, the Queen’s first great-grandchild was hailed by Canadians as one of their own.

  Catherine Middleton’s enthusiastic welcome by the royal family was even more consequential, because she was marrying a man destined to be king. The Queen’s embrace of an “ordinary” young woman undercut a core republican argument that the monarchy is hidebound and remote from its subjects. Even Carole Middleton’s working-class roots in the coal mines of Durham were seen as an example of the monarchy’s more inclusive spirit. “From the pit to the Palace in three generations!” said longtime courtier Malcolm Ross.

  In their first television interviews, William and his future queen presented an image that augured well for the monarchy’s future—self-possessed, contented, and clearly in love. Like William, Catherine came off as intelligent and reflective. “We’re both down-to-earth,” he said, “and take the mickey out of each other a lot.” Catherine paid homage to Diana, calling her an “inspirational woman to look up to.” But unlike the late princess, she seemed instinctively to understand that her “daunting” role would require her to keep her husband in the forefront. “Over the years, William’s really looked after me,” she said, calling him “a great, loving boyfriend.” William patted his fiancée’s hand protectively, emphasized that “there’s no pressure” to fill his mother’s shoes, and said that Kate would make her “own future and … destiny.”

  William and Catherine timed their wedding to avoid any conflict with the Queen’s full schedule of engagements in the spring and summer. The wedding date, April 29, 2011, was also comfortably distant from two fraught milestones—Diana’s fiftieth birthday on July 1, and the thirtieth anniversary of Charles and Diana’s wedding on July 29.

  After attending the weddings of twenty of their friends, William and Catherine had firm ideas about what they wanted for their own. The Queen was deeply involved in the planning as well. She tasted the food for the reception and approved the menu as well as the flowers. The celebration was intended to blend old and new, starting with the ceremony in Westminster Abbey, where Elizabeth II and Prince Philip were married, rather than St. Paul’s Cathedral, the choice of Charles and Diana. The 1,900 invitations to the Abbey came from the Queen, not Charles, using traditional royal wording specifying the marriage of William “with” Catherine rather than the more conventional “to.” Elizabeth II also invited 650 guests to a midday reception at Buckingham Palace. Instead of the customary seated “wedding breakfast,” guests were to be served Pol Roger vintage champagne and hot and cold canapés prepared by twenty-two Palace chefs. In another departure from past practice, William and Catherine designated twenty-six charities to receive donations in lieu of gifts.

  The young couple controlled the guest list, which was heavily weighted toward their contemporaries and representatives of William’s charities. To accommodate the couple’s preferences, ambassadors were invited, but their spouses were not. Even the Queen and Prince Philip had an allocation of only forty places, not unlike most twenty-something weddings, where the grandparents’ circle is rarely in evidence. Elizabeth II was able to invite such members of her extended family as Margaret Rhodes (who had been one of her own bridesmaids), and she arranged for Angela Kelly’s staff of in-house seamstresses to make her cousin a pale blue dress, coat, and hat.

  A MONTH BEFORE the nuptials, the Queen attended a private party at St. James’s Palace given by her cousin Lady Elizabeth Anson to celebrate the fiftieth year of her party planning business. For more than ninety minutes, Elizabeth II mingled with the crowd of six hundred that included aristocrats as well as caterers and florists. “Usually when members of the royal family come into a room, there i
s a vacuum around them,” said one partygoer. “But tonight everyone is crowded in around her.” The Queen was in a merry mood, smiling and chatting informally with old friends and strangers alike, without the benefit of Palace aides to smooth her path. “Come on, you two, get together!” she said with an emphatic gesture as she made one spontaneous introduction. Later she remarked on how much she enjoyed spending time with such a diverse group of people. “And everyone was so friendly to me!” she exclaimed.

  With eight days to go before her grandson’s big event, she celebrated her eighty-fifth birthday, which coincided with her annual Maundy Service, held at Westminster Abbey for the first time in a decade. She spent nearly a half hour presenting red and white purses of Maundy money to eighty-five men and eighty-five women, walking with a sure stride and showing no sign of the pain in one of her knees that had been bothering her for several months. (She had even given up riding for a while, but had resumed her daily outing on horseback when she and her court moved to Windsor for their annual stay during April.) Philip, looking trim in his morning suit, watched her intently as she carried out her solemn act of humility, and the elderly recipients greeted her with bows and curtsys. Midway through the service, he walked to the pulpit to read the second lesson, from the Book of Matthew, in a clear and strong voice. At the end, the congregation of nearly two thousand sang a thunderous “God Save the Queen” accompanied by military trumpeters and the organ at full volume.

  By the following Friday, the Abbey had been transformed into a leafy bower, with the strategic placement along the nave of twenty-foot-tall maple and hornbeam trees in large planters brimming with lilies of the valley. Under the majestic Gothic arches, Catherine wanted to create the illusion of the countryside as she walked down the red-carpeted aisle with her father. It was a bold and successful move, one of numerous examples of the distinctly modern stamp she and William put on their day. The Order of Service not only featured a stunning photograph of the couple by Mario Testino, it included an informal message of thanks to the public for its “kindness” and “incredibly moving … affection” that “touched us both deeply.”