Sir Harold told his wife, “I never knew a woman could be so brave.” But when the queen went to the nursery and three-year-old Prince Charles asked her when Grandpa was going to come back to play soldiers with him, she completely lost control of her emotions, hugging the little boy tightly, unable to reply.
The proclamation of the ascension of Queen Elizabeth II was delayed for twenty-four hours due to very unusual and private circumstances. The fifty-one-year-old Queen Mother had missed two consecutive menstrual cycles, and there was a slim possibility that she was pregnant. If this were confirmed, the succession would be in abeyance until she gave birth, because a boy would have displaced the Princess Elizabeth in the line of succession. However, it was quickly established that the Queen Mother was not pregnant, but perimenopausal.
The reign of George VI had begun with misgivings, but he was much mourned. A crowd of more than 305,000 waited in the frosty air for the opportunity to file past the coffin of their departed sovereign, “a good man,” in the words of the Daily Mirror. Even more people lined the streets on February 15 to bid farewell as the funeral cortege passed. Later that day, the king was laid to rest in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor. Memorial cards and floral tributes came from the great and the humble, ministers and tradesmen. But the most poignant of all was the wreath of white orchids, white lilies, and white carnations that rested atop his coffin, accompanied by a card that read, “For darling Bertie, from his always loving Elizabeth.”
Two days after the funeral, Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, as she was to be styled from then on, released a statement to the kingdom and its Dominions: “…I want you to know how your concern for me has upheld me in my sorrow, and how proud you have made me by your wonderful tributes to my dear husband, a great and noble King….
“Throughout our married life we have tried, the King and I, to fulfill with all our hearts and all our strength the great task of service that was laid upon us. My only wish now is that I may be allowed to continue the work we sought to do together….”
Did Elizabeth blame the Duke and Duchess of Windsor for leaving her a widow at the age of fifty-one? Would Bertie have been such a heavy smoker if the stress of kingship hadn’t been so overwhelming? As she prepared to recede somewhat from public life, it became clear that Elizabeth still harbored plenty of malice toward Wallis. For several weeks after the king’s death people walked on eggshells around the new widow. Finally, someone had the temerity to mention the duchess’s name in her presence. “Oh yes. The woman who killed my husband,” the Queen Mother retorted in a brisk staccato.
Elizabeth wished for an active constitutional role after her husband died, but she was now the second lady in the land, and it was up to her daughter to determine the role she would play from now on. Fortunately the new queen understood what a valuable asset her mother was—not only experienced, but beloved—and took full advantage of it. For the next five decades, until just a few months before her death on March 30, 2002, the Queen Mother had a full calendar of public engagements. Meanwhile, she overcame colon cancer, and in the last decade of her life endured a hip replacement, another broken hip, failing eyesight, obstructions in her throat, and lesions on her legs.
On Wednesday, July 19, 2000, Britain celebrated her one hundredth birthday with great fanfare. On her actual centennial, August 4, Prince Charles escorted his grandmother from Clarence House to Buckingham Palace as the Mall was thronged with well-wishers surrounding her, in his words, “with love, devotion, and gratitude for all that you mean to people.”
Elizabeth later told a friend that she didn’t understand why everyone was making such a fuss out of it. “I was just doing my job.”
On November 3, 2000, she fell in her bedroom at Clarence House and broke her collarbone, requiring a six-week convalescence. She slipped again just before Christmas but refused to admit she was in pain and stoically greeted people on her feet during the holiday party for the staff at St. James’s Palace.
The queen telephoned her mother on February 9, 2002, to relay the sad news that Princess Margaret had died after suffering a stroke the previous afternoon. She was seventy-one. Three days earlier the family had marked another milestone: the fiftieth anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II’s accession to the throne. The Queen Mother had survived Bertie by as many years.
By late March, her health was very fragile. She was barely eating anything, usually having scrambled eggs and a small glass of champagne in the evening and saying it reminded her of the late-night suppers she enjoyed with Bertie when they were newlyweds. The queen, and Princess Margaret’s children, David Linley and Sarah Chatto, were at her bedside on Holy Saturday, March 30, 2002, when she died peacefully.
Elizabeth had organized the events of her own state funeral. On April 2, her body was taken to St. James’s Palace, where the family could privately pay their respects. Three days later, a public procession featuring more than sixteen hundred servicemen escorted her coffin to Westminster Hall. Elizabeth’s personal standard was draped over it, and atop the standard rested the crown that had been made for her coronation as Queen Consort of England and Empress Consort of India in 1937, the Koh-i-Noor diamond given to Queen Victoria, the first Empress of India, sparkling at its center. A single wreath rested on the coffin. The card beside it read, “In Loving Memory, Lilibet.”
Elizabeth’s coffin was placed on a catafalque in the exact spot where her husband’s bier had rested fifty years earlier. So many people wished to pay their respects that the government had to keep the viewing areas open twenty-two hours a day.
After her April 9 funeral in Westminster Abbey, she was interred in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor beside her husband, together with the casket containing the ashes of their daughter Princess Margaret.
The marriage of Albert Frederick Arthur George and Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes Lyon—“Bert and Betty”—was not only the rare royal love match, but one of equal partners who respected and complemented each other, balancing their strengths and weaknesses. Each was possessed of a strong faith and a keen sense of duty. Reluctant monarchs at first, instead of shirking the awesome responsibility that was literally thrust upon them, they rose to the occasion with dignity, integrity, and a sense of humor. They delighted in each other and in their children, providing Britain with the image of a stable, devoted, modern family that was not merely a publicist’s dream; it was their happy reality. Elizabeth dedicated herself to Bertie, and by bolstering him with the courage to succeed she helped transform him, first into an active and effective member of the royal family when his own father didn’t believe in him, and later into a monarch with the strength to turn his back on his ungrateful brother and to look the real enemy squarely in the face.
And yet, the benefits were hardly one-sided. On the surface of things it had always seemed to be the bubbly, smiling queen who had instilled confidence in the bashful king. But as Lady Cynthia Colville observed, “[F]ew people realized how much she had relied on him—on his capacity for wise and detached judgment, for sound advice, and how lost she now felt without him…. That was the measure of her greatness as a woman. She drew him out and made him a man so strong that she could lean upon him.”
Edward VIII was a disastrously unsuitable monarch, and had he remained on the throne, Britain’s fate, and that of Western Europe, might have been wildly different during and after the Second World War. Noël Coward once quipped that every town in England should erect a statue to Wallis Simpson “for the blessing she had bestowed upon the country.”
And Lady Diana Cooper observed, “We were lucky to get George VI and Elizabeth—they were by far the better loved in the end…. Yes, in the end it was a blessing that Wallis came along and took him away.”
In 1968, the Queen Mother viewed a Cecil Beaton retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery in London. She paused in front of some of the photographs, reminiscing about the sitters. When she came to a picture of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, she stopped and stood very still. What di
d she think as she gazed at the image? Had time softened the edges of her enmity? Finally Elizabeth spoke. “They’re so happy, and really a great deal of good came out of it. We have much to be thankful for.”
We do, indeed.
PRINCE WILLIAM OF WALES
(1982–)
DUKE OF CAMBRIDGE, EARL OF STRATHEARN, AND BARON CARRICKFERGUS (2011–)
The older son of Prince Charles and Princess Diana spent the first week of his life as “Baby Wales” while his parents argued over what to name him. They settled on William Arthur Philip Louis—for the Conqueror, the king of Camelot, the infant’s paternal grandfather, and for Charles’s mentor Earl Mountbatten, who was assassinated by an IRA bomb in the summer of 1979. Diana’s empathetic comment to Charles about the earl’s funeral as the pair of them sat on a hay bale made the prince view the rosy-cheeked teenager as marriage material in the first place. Theirs was one of the great mismatches of royal history—but socially it was nearly a marriage of equals. Although Diana was a commoner, she was the youngest daughter of the eighth Earl Spencer, the descendant of an aristocratic house whose English lineage stretches back farther back than the Windsors’ does.
As a brief aside, during the coverage of William’s engagement and wedding, American journalists, particularly the television broadcasters, appeared completely confused by the word “commoner”; most couldn’t comprehend how someone who had a title could still be referred to as a commoner, and for some reason, they thought the word was pejorative, uncomfortable about applying it to Catherine Middleton, fearing they were somehow insulting her. The word is not derogatory, but it is a class distinction, and one that is extremely easy to remember. A commoner is anyone who is not of royal blood, whether he or she hails from the aristocracy, the middle classes, or the working class. Diana and the Queen Mother were commoners, even though their fathers were earls. These women became royal only by virtue of their marriages.
Diana was keen to afford her sons, Prince William, born in June 1982, and Prince Harry, born in September 1984, the most “normal” upbringing two royal boys could have. She took them to McDonald’s and insisted that they be given pocket money for sweets (royals traditionally never carry cash). But most crucial to experiencing life in the real world was going to school with other children. Their lives would be uncommon as it was, and royal obligations would come all too soon; she wanted them to have the chance to be kids. Sadly, William and Harry’s first official engagement would be to walk behind the gun carriage that bore the coffin of their mother on September 6, 1997. While 750 million people worldwide had watched Diana marry Charles in St. Paul’s Cathedral on July 29, 1981, an estimated 2.5 billion were glued to their televisions for her funeral.
One of those people was fifteen-year-old Kate Middleton, a half year older than Prince William. In the days following Diana’s death, like millions of others across the globe, she found herself shaking her head at the apparent indifference of the royal family toward the passing of the woman who had been their greatest asset, difficult at times, to be sure, but nonetheless the mother of a future king. “It’s too little, too late,” Kate murmured, in response to the queen’s taking to the airwaves, under increasing pressure from the people, the press, and her new prime minister, Tony Blair. “The Queen really doesn’t get it, does she?” the teen commiserated with one of her schoolmates. “None of them seem to get it. The Royal Family is a pretty heartless bunch. But I feel so sorry for Prince William and Prince Harry.” Her empathy for the young prince began early. Who knew then that the “heartless bunch” she criticized for their callousness and cluelessness would someday become her in-laws?
Diana had died as a result of a horrific car accident in a Paris tunnel as the sedan in which she was riding with her boyfriend, Emad “Dodi” Al Fayed, was chased by a hellish cavalcade of paparazzi. Several inquests blamed the incident on the blood alcohol level of their chauffeur, Henri Paul. Prince William would always blame the paparazzi, whom he called the “hounds of hell.” Very early in his childhood Diana had noticed her older son’s sensitivity and vulnerability, referring to William as a male version of herself, and a “very old soul,” even at the age of nine. “We are like two peas in a pod,” she observed. “He feels everything too much. He needs to be protected.”
From himself, perhaps. William was such a rambunctious toddler, and so destructive around the house (which happened to be Kensington Palace), that he earned the nickname “the basher.” And at Mrs. Mynor’s Nursery School, where he was enrolled in September 1985, the little prince was quite the tyrannical tyke. He tormented his teachers and fellow classmates, drawing his make-believe sword and threatening to lop off their heads if they didn’t let him have his way, shouting, “My daddy’s a real prince and my daddy can beat up your daddy!”
Appalled by the general chilliness of the Windsors, both in the specific and the abstract, Princess Diana made certain that her sons learned how to be kind. William’s “basher” behavior and rude treatment of the staff and students at Mrs. Mynor’s had been deemed intolerable, and a new nanny was hired, charged with making sure the spoiled brat ceased being a royal pain. Using Diana herself as a model of the necessary virtues of kindness and compassion, Ruth Wallace, or “Nanny Roof,” as William called her, instilled in him a sense of empathy that replaced his anger. It worked, and in just a few months the little boy had become his mother’s chief protector. In no time at all he was a changed child—almost too sensitive and vulnerable.
The Waleses’ marital discord at the time caused palace staffers to become concerned about the emotional stability of William and his younger brother, Harry. William was often caught in the cross fire of his parents’ screaming matches as the royal marriage disintegrated before his eyes. According to his biographer Christopher Andersen, during one skirmish he saw his father lob a riding boot across the room at his mother. And it became a habit for him to pass tissues through the closed door to his sobbing mummy, insisting, “I hate to see you sad.”
If his beloved papa wasn’t tormenting Mummy enough, the paparazzi made it worse. Years later, William endured recurring nightmares in which a beautiful woman was trapped in a speeding car, chased down by members of the media, but in his dreams the river wasn’t the Seine; it was the Thames. And the woman was his girlfriend, Kate Middleton.
PRINCE WILLIAM OF WALES (1982–) AND
CATHERINE ELIZABETH MIDDLETON (1982–)
They affectionately call each other “Big Willy” and “Babykins.”
Although his parents’ royal marriage was both arranged and unhappy, Prince William chose his own bride, a woman who appears to be his best friend, perhaps even his soul mate. However, in a country founded, and still grounded, in class structure, Kate Middleton is the most common of any royal consort in British history. While William’s four-times-great-grandmother Queen Victoria was transforming England into an empire, his fiancée’s maternal ancestors endured a Dickensian existence in the coal mines of Newcastle.
Catherine, as Buckingham Palace reminds us that her name is from now on, is the first woman not born of aristocratic blood to wed an heir presumptive to Britain’s throne since the clandestine wedding in 1660 of James, Duke of York, to Anne Hyde, whose scandalous relationship was profiled in Royal Affairs. But even Anne was not from such humble stock as Catherine. Anne was the daughter of a Wiltshire lawyer, but at the time of her secret wedding, her father was the Chancellor of the Realm.
Kate Middleton’s lineage is significantly less grand than Anne Hyde’s, although her father’s ancestors included upwardly mobile businessmen and industrialists whose investments enabled their children to enjoy the privileges of the upper middle class. Over the generations, by dint of hard work, ambition, and entrepreneurship, her family became what we might call nouveau riche. Kate’s mother, the vivacious Carole Goldsmith, was an air hostess at British Airways when she met the quiet, self-effacing Michael Middleton, a flight dispatcher. They married on June 21, 1980, with Carole arriving at the
picturesque village church princess-style, in a horse-drawn carriage. Catherine was born on January 9, 1982, and her sister, Philippa, known as Pippa, followed in 1983. After having two children, Carole decided to become more earthbound and immersed herself in village life.
Around the time of her son James’s birth in 1987, Carole established a business selling unique grab bags for children’s birthday parties. Business expanded with demand, and then, with the advent of the Internet, what had begun as a local business took off. Michael quit his job to work for Party Pieces full-time. The venture soon became England’s premier party-planning company, enabling the Middletons to move to a £2 million home in Bucklebury, a posh suburb of West Berkshire, and to send Kate and her siblings to expensive schools, where they could hobnob with the offspring of the aristocracy. Kate was a miniature princess even then; she and Pippa modeled sparkly tulle dresses, girly tiaras, and plastic jewelry for the Party Pieces catalog.
Fate brought William and Catherine together like the plot of a Jane Austen novel. They met during their first, or “freshers,” year of college at the University of St. Andrews, but Kate almost didn’t enroll there. Her excellent grades and test scores enabled to her attend any school she wished, and her initial choice was the University of Edinburgh, which had the best art history curriculum (her chosen major) in the UK. However, as far as her extracurricular activities went, in addition to captaining her high school’s field hockey team and playing in the first pair at tennis, the teenage Catherine had also been an assiduous scholar of William Wales. As a lanky, geeky schoolgirl, one of the tallest in her class at the tony Marlborough College, a public (in the United States it would be called “private”) prep school in Wiltshire, eighty miles west of London, she made a hobby out of clipping every news article she could find about the young prince. She followed William’s schedule by logging into the Court Calendar to see where the members of the royal family were slated to appear. She studied his photographs and imagined the personality that lay beneath the rosy cheeks, fair complexion, and blue eyes, all of which earned her the nickname “Princess in Waiting” from her friends. “She was besotted,” said her classmate Jessica Hay, whose boyfriend at the time was Nicholas Knatchbull, one of Prince Charles’s godsons and William’s cousin and mentor at Eton. From Jessica, who had met William, Kate got a bit of an inside scoop on the heir, which served to solidify the positive opinions she’d already formed about him. “He was shyer than I ever thought. I got the feeling he wasn’t used to normal girls being around him,” Jessica observed.
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