Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

SEVENTEEN

Tragedy and Tradition

ANOTHER WAVE OF TABLOID HEADLINES IN MID-JANUARY ABRUPTLY dashed the Queen’s hopes for a dignified new year. Both the Daily Mirror and The Sun published compromising transcripts of a telephone conversation between Charles and Camilla that had been secretly recorded in mysterious circumstances during December 1989, the same month as Diana’s now infamous “Squidgy” tape. In much of the conversation, Camilla tried to boost Charles’s spirits (“You’re a clever old thing, an awfully good brain lurking there, isn’t there?”). But attention focused on their inane sexual banter, especially Charles’s juvenile wish to be reincarnated as a tampon so he could “live inside your trousers.” The Palace declined comment, but the tapes were undeniably authentic and confirmed Diana’s allegations about her husband’s affair. In a poll published by the tabloid Today, 68 percent of the respondents thought Charles had tarnished his reputation, and 42 percent thought ten-year-old Prince William should be the next king.

The Queen briefly managed to shift attention from the scandal when David Airlie held a press conference in February “to explain to the media exactly why the Queen had decided to pay tax and the way in which it was going to be done.” The Queen’s senior advisers did not speak for the record, on the principle that “courtiers should be neither seen nor heard.” But the Queen wanted her Lord Chamberlain to show her willingness not only to move with the times, but to answer all questions openly on her behalf.

Airlie intentionally held the briefing in the historic Queen Anne Room at St. James’s Palace under the huge portraits of kings—a not so subtle reminder that he was representing centuries of tradition. He spelled out the details of taxes to be paid on Elizabeth II’s private income as well as capital gains, after various deductions, including stipends paid to Prince Philip and the Queen Mother for their official expenses. The press pounced on the most important exclusion, asking why inheritance tax would not be paid on assets such as Sandringham, Balmoral, and the Duchy of Lancaster that were passed on to her successor.

“Is she not like us?” asked one reporter. “She isn’t like you!” Airlie bantered, explaining that the sovereign must have private resources that shouldn’t be dissipated through inheritance. Airlie’s presentation helped mollify complaints about royal finances, although questions remained about the magnitude of the Queen’s wealth and the level of expenses for luxuries such as Britannia.

Later that year, while the Queen was at Balmoral, Bobo MacDonald, her beloved former nursemaid and longtime dresser, died in her suite at Buckingham Palace at age eighty-nine. She had been semiretired from her duties for a number of years, but remained close to Elizabeth II, who had hired two nurses to provide round-the-clock care after Bobo’s health began to fail. The Queen came down to London from Scotland to attend the funeral, which she arranged at the Chapel Royal in St. James’s Palace. Joining her were other family members and staff, including Bobo’s sister Ruby, also a longtime employee in the royal household. Bobo had served her “little lady” for sixty-seven years, and the Queen marked her passing with typical restraint.

None of the Queen’s children stirred up further problems in 1993, although Diana proved to be a continuing distraction. On the one hand, she devoted herself to a range of charitable causes such as drug and alcohol abuse, hospice care, debilitating illnesses such as AIDS, and services for mentally handicapped children. But behind the scenes she was feeding information on her whereabouts to Richard Kay, the royal reporter at the Daily Mail, in an effort to upstage Charles as well as other members of the royal family. She was also cooperating with Morton on yet another book.

She had ended her affair with James Hewitt, her former riding instructor, in 1991 when he became the focus of press surveillance. “She simply stopped ringing and taking my calls,” he said years later. She then became involved with a married art dealer named Oliver Hoare. It was a tempestuous relationship, something of an obsession for the princess, who pestered the Hoare household with anonymous telephone calls that prompted a police inquiry. The press got wind of the romance and began reporting sightings toward the end of 1993.

Around the same time, Diana tearfully announced that she was retiring from public life and needed “time and space” to get her bearings and focus on her sons, blaming the intolerable pressure of “overwhelming” media attention. Both the Queen and Prince Philip had urged her to proceed quietly if she wished to disengage from her royal obligations and her charities. Even though she opted for public melodrama, they still invited her to join the family at Sandringham for Christmas. In an atmosphere thick with tension, the Queen got particularly cross when a pack of tabloid “snappers” showed up to take pictures of the princess as she arrived.

Elizabeth II was riding at Sandringham several weeks later when she suffered a rare accident as her horse tripped and fell. She had her hand on the horse’s neck, which allowed her to give him a push when he was rolling over on his side. But he landed on her nevertheless, severely injuring a ligament in her left wrist. Her mount was Centennial, the stallion famously ridden twelve years earlier by Ronald Reagan, who sent her a solicitous letter. “I wasn’t paying enough attention!” she wrote in her reply to the former president. She went on to describe the accident in detail and share her frustration at having her arm encased in plaster.

Still in a cast, she embarked on a three-week tour of six Caribbean countries and Bermuda in February and March. Visiting that part of the world gave her special satisfaction. “She has no regard for color,” said longtime BBC correspondent Wesley Kerr, a native Jamaican raised by white foster parents in Britain. “Jamaica is her fourth-biggest realm. When she refers to herself as the Queen of Jamaica she says it with utter conviction. In the Caribbean there is a closeness.”

The Queen knew Kerr had a large extended family in Jamaica that numbered nineteen half siblings on his father’s side. “Did you see your father, Mr. Kerr, and did he see me?” she asked during one gathering. On another day, Kerr marveled at her composure during a walkabout in Kingston. “A group of women were grabbing her and saying ‘Nice! Nice!’ ” said Kerr. “She didn’t flinch but her bodyguards almost grabbed her. She didn’t mind the contact. She didn’t want to be like a piece of china.”

Three months later, Elizabeth II observed a meaningful event in her own life and that of her country when she marked the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day on June 6, 1994. She also had her first extended time with the forty-second American president, Bill Clinton, and his wife, Hillary. On the eve of the celebrations at the Normandy beaches, Elizabeth II and Philip hosted a banquet in Portsmouth and invited the Clintons to spend the night on Britannia.

Seated next to the sixty-eight-year-old Queen at dinner, the forty-seven-year-old president was taken with “the clever manner in which she discussed public issues, probing me for information and insights without venturing too far into expressing her own political views.… Her Majesty impressed me as someone who but for the circumstance of her birth, might have become a successful politician or diplomat. As it was, she had to be both, without quite seeming to be either.” From her place between Prince Philip and John Major, Hillary watched as the Queen “nodded and laughed at Bill’s stories.” The next day on the beach at Arromanches, the Queen “was clearly happy as the veterans—her generation—marched past,” wrote William Shawcross. “There was a rare catch in her voice as she and the old men reveled in their pride in each other. Her heir, Prince Charles, also there, was equally moved.”

THE EVIDENT HARMONY between mother and son was dispelled later that month when Charles shocked his parents by appearing in a television interview with journalist Jonathan Dimbleby. The prince had been cooperating with Dimbleby for two years on the TV program and a companion biography, ostensibly to highlight his charitable ventures on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his investiture as Prince of Wales. Of equal importance to Charles was the chance to counteract the negative portrait of his character that Diana had given to Morton and others in the press.

After the project was well under way, Charles briefed his parents on its general contours, and they advised him to avoid any frank discussion of private matters. He had other ideas. The two-and-a-half-hour documentary on June 29, 1994, covered a wide range of anodyne topics, but all were eclipsed by a brief exchange addressing the “damaging charge” that Charles had been “persistently unfaithful” to Diana “from the beginning” of the marriage. Charles said he had been “faithful and honorable” to his wife until their marriage “became irretrievably broken down, us both having tried.” He didn’t mention Camilla as other than “a friend for a very long time,” but it was clear she was his mistress, and that their affair had resumed five years after Charles and Diana were married.

Charles genuinely believed his straightforward response would put to rest “the myth that he had never intended to make his marriage work.” He gained public sympathy largely because of his demeanor, which was tormented and remorseful rather than callous. Still, his public admission of adultery embarrassed his mother and violated her code of discretion. It also raised the ante with Diana, provoking her to consider her own retaliatory television appearance.

Two months later the Queen had even greater cause for dismay when she learned that Charles had provided Dimbleby with diaries, letters, and official papers. John Major was concerned as well, telling Woodrow Wyatt that he might use the Official Secrets Act (a British law that shields state secrets) to prevent publication of anything from ministerial documents. Charles complied when the Queen asked for the return of the confidential papers, but their relationship was so strained that he didn’t visit his parents at Balmoral, staying instead with the Queen Mother at Birkhall.

Elizabeth II was beginning a historic four-day trip to Russia in mid-October—the first visit by a British monarch since her great-grandfather King Edward VII met with Tsar Nicholas II in 1908 aboard a yacht in Russian waters—when an excerpt of the Dimbleby book appeared in The Sunday Times. The contents of the 620-page book drove a deeper wedge between Charles and his parents. He portrayed his mother as a remote figure during his unhappy childhood, and described his father as overbearing and insensitive. Elizabeth II and Philip were stung by these characterizations, according to their friends. She refrained from comment, although all three of Charles’s siblings were indignant and rebuked him to his face. When asked about the controversy, the Queen Mother signaled her disdain with a wave of her hands and exclaimed, “That Jonathan Dimbleby!”

While the press focused on the Dimbleby revelations at home, the Queen carried on in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Her visit tapped dark historical currents. The Romanov rulers of the Russian empire and the British royal family had been close relatives. When the Bolsheviks murdered Tsar Nicholas II and his family in 1918, it was the Queen’s grandfather King George V who sealed their fate by refusing to give political asylum in Britain to his Romanov first cousin. Paradoxically, the Soviet Communist Party had always shown the British royal family considerable respect. Still, the Queen could not in good conscience visit Russia until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

The Russians were eager to receive her in 1994. “The monarchy is unshakeable,” said the Russian newspaper Izvestia. “No matter what happens in the country, the British know that there is an institution that will survive any difficulty.” Boris Yeltsin, the first democratically elected president of Russia, was as enraptured by the Queen as Khrushchev had been, confiding to her how difficult it was to promote democracy after so many years of totalitarian rule. When he tried to draw out her opinions, she referred him to her foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd.

At a performance of Giselle by the Bolshoi ballet, Elizabeth II wore her spectacular diamond and sapphire tiara, necklace, and bracelet and received a ten-minute standing ovation. “I thought the jewels were too much,” she fretted afterward to David Thomas, the Crown Jeweler. “No, Ma’am, everyone loved it,” said Thomas, who felt it was important to “fly the flag.” Douglas Hurd said that “the Queen evoked a sort of nostalgia” among the Russians, who “were groping for their own past.”

Back home, the new year got off to a rocky start when Martin Charteris offered an unintentionally candid glimpse of the Queen’s scandal-plagued family when he gave an interview to The Spectator magazine. He later confessed he had been lulled by the “attractive” reporter and thought he was speaking on background—“very conceited of me, I know.” He said out loud what many in royal circles had been saying sotto voce: that Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, was “vulgar, vulgar, vulgar” and that Charles and Diana would “likely divorce,” an outcome that would “clear the air” and would not prevent Charles from someday becoming king.

The retired courtier also put the Queen in perspective, describing her as a realist “far more than you would imagine.” He said she was determined to “sit it out,” knowing that the monarchy goes through “phases.” When asked about the comments several months later, the Queen Mother assured her friend Woodrow Wyatt that she and the rest of the family weren’t cross with Charteris in the least. “He’s got such a lot of wisdom,” she said.

Elizabeth II had “one of the outstanding experiences of my life” in March 1995 when she stepped foot on South African soil for the first time in nearly five decades. She was greeted as “Elizabeth” by Nelson Mandela, her host for a state visit. (He and Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia were the only world leaders to call her by her Christian name, without causing offense.) She had initially met him in 1991 during a conference of Commonwealth heads of government in Zimbabwe. As leader of the ANC, Mandela had been invited only as an observer, and South Africa still remained outside the Commonwealth. Lacking head of government status, he technically couldn’t be included in the Queen’s traditional banquet. But Robert Fellowes urged the Queen to make an exception. “Let’s have him,” she responded instantly. At the time, her decision was potentially controversial; just four years earlier Margaret Thatcher had branded Mandela a terrorist.

In April 1994, he was elected president of South Africa in the country’s first democratic election open to all races. The Commonwealth welcomed the former rogue nation as a member soon afterward, and the Queen attended a special service in Westminster Abbey to mark the occasion that July. Her South Africa visit eight months later attracted large and enthusiastic crowds, notably in the black townships where people held up signs saying, “THANK YOU FOR COMING BACK.” It was “a huge emotional charge for everybody,” said Douglas Hurd.

Elizabeth II was less reassured about her standing in her own country, where she continued to be overshadowed by Diana’s exploits—news reports about the princess’s telephone stalking of Oliver Hoare, a book detailing her affair with James Hewitt, derided by the tabloid press as the “love rat,” the Andrew Morton sequel that included gruesome specifics of Diana’s self-mutilation, and headline-grabbing accounts of what she characterized as her “re-launched” life as a global charity worker—less than a year after her vow to retire.

With the approach of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe on May 8, 1995, the Queen was uncharacteristically hesitant about what to do. “She was nervous about the fact that the monarchy was not doing well in the public’s esteem,” recalled Robert Salisbury, the Tory leader in the House of Lords who was in charge of organizing the celebration. “I wanted to reproduce the crowds at Buckingham Palace. She was afraid they would not turn out, so she wanted to have it in the Horse Guards Parade, where crowds would be smaller. I said, ‘No, I can fill it.’ I was extremely nervous. If I had called it wrong I would have felt an awful idiot.”

The crowds ended up even larger than they had been in 1945. Looking across the sea of people from the balcony with her sister and ninety-four-year-old mother—the very trio who had stood in the same spot with King George VI fifty years earlier—she wore the stony-faced expression she used to suppress strong feelings. “The Queen’s eyes were brimming,” said one of her ladies-in-waiting. “But she was absolutely determined that nobody should see when they got back inside. She quickly took a large gin and tonic and knocked it back.”

AS WAS SO often the case in those years, the benefits of the touching royal tableau were only temporary. On November 14—quite intentionally, the forty-seventh birthday of Prince Charles—Diana informed officials at Buckingham Palace that she would be appearing shortly on the BBC’s respected public affairs program Panorama. Unbeknownst even to her private secretary or press secretary, she had already taped the fifty-five-minute interview in her apartment at Kensington Palace with Martin Bashir, a little known reporter and producer for the network.

The program aired on November 20, the forty-eighth wedding anniversary of Elizabeth II and Philip. It was Diana’s ultimate revenge against her estranged husband. No longer shielded by an intermediary, she had been furnished the questions in advance and had rehearsed the answers. Barbara Walters, who later talked to Diana about the interview, called it a “superb performance.” The princess spoke unflinchingly about her emotional torment, her romance with Hewitt, and her shattered marriage, and she portrayed the royal family as insensitive to her problems, preferring to dismiss her as “unstable.”

She reserved her most withering fire for Charles, whose fitness for the throne she undermined by saying he would find the role of king “suffocating.” The “top job,” she said, “would bring enormous limitations to him, and I don’t know whether he could adapt to that.” As for his affair with Camilla, Diana memorably said, “There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.” She conveniently ignored the fact that during the time referred to—from 1986 onward—there were in fact four in the marriage, including James Hewitt. The other line that resonated with the fifteen million TV viewers in Britain and millions more overseas was her wish to be “a queen of people’s hearts.”

Her close friend Rosa Monckton later wrote that the performance was “Diana at her worst.” Charles’s friend Nicholas Soames said the interview showed “advanced stages of paranoia.” The damage, both self-inflicted and to the royal family, was far greater than that caused by the Morton book, although a Gallup survey registered an initial positive response for the princess, with 77 percent saying she had a right to present her side of the story. More worrying for the Queen, 46 percent of respondents believed Charles was unfit to be king, an increase of 13 percent in two years. Over lunch in Mayfair, Martin Charteris told Woodrow Wyatt that Diana was “very dangerous” as well as “unbalanced,” and that a divorce was now “inescapable.”

The Queen did not watch Diana’s interview. Charles Anson, her press secretary, made it clear to the media on her authority that she “never watched Panorama,” an unusual expression of her personal preference that “took the BBC aback,” said one courtier. Her advisers did tune in and briefed her on the salient points. After consulting further with John Major and George Carey, she informed the prime minister on December 12 that she would write to Charles and Diana individually asking them to agree to an “early divorce … in the best interests of the country.” Since they had been officially separated for more than two years, Charles could file for an uncontested divorce if Diana concurred. The Queen signed her precisely phrased instructions—in effect, a royal command—to her daughter-in-law, “with love from Mama.”

The biggest controversy over the divorce had nothing to do with money or child custody or perquisites, but with Diana’s title. In a meeting with the Queen at Buckingham Palace on February 15, 1996, attended by deputy private secretary Robin Janvrin, who took notes, Diana volunteered to give up “Her Royal Highness.” Elizabeth II remained predictably noncommittal, but she urged Diana to sit down with Charles for a detailed discussion of all the issues. Afterward, Diana told Paul Burrell that her mother-in-law had shown her “sensitivity and kindness.”

When Charles and Diana finally met at St. James’s Palace on February 28, Diana agreed to a divorce. They would share the upbringing of their two sons, and she would be known simply as Diana, Princess of Wales, relinquishing “Her Royal Highness.” But Diana again overreached by immediately revealing the confidential details of the discussion to the press, along with her own particularly damaging spin (transmitted to her ally at the Daily Mail, Richard Kay) that the Queen and Charles had pressured her to drop her royal title. That assertion was false, and Elizabeth II had the notes from her meeting with the princess to prove it. She authorized Charles Anson to make an unusually direct statement: “The decision to drop the title is the Princess’s and the Princess’s alone. It is wrong that the Queen or the Prince asked her. I am saying categorically that is not true. The Palace does not say something specific on a point like this unless we are absolutely sure of the facts.”

As Charles and Diana’s complicated negotiations proceeded, Andrew and Fergie’s divorce became final on May 30, a decade after their wedding. Along the lines of Diana’s agreement, Fergie gave up “Her Royal Highness” and was called Sarah, Duchess of York. But unlike the Waleses, the Yorks parted amicably despite Fergie’s frequent misbehavior. In bringing up their daughters, they described themselves as “co-parents,” and Fergie said they were in fact the “happiest unmarried couple.”

Charles’s generous divorce settlement for Diana was disclosed that summer: a £17 million lump sum along with more than £385,000 annually for Diana’s office expenses. She would live and work out of Kensington Palace, and Charles would do the same at St. James’s Palace. She would conduct her charity activities separately from the royal family, but she would need to secure permission from the Queen as well as the Foreign Office for any overseas travel in the line of work. The state apartments at St. James’s Palace would be available to her for entertaining, and she could use royal transport for her official engagements. Diana tried at the last minute to hang on to her “HRH,” but she finally yielded when fourteen-year-old William told her it didn’t matter to him. To bolster her status as a semiroyal, the Palace took pains to say that she would still be “regarded as a member of the royal family.” Whenever she attended state or national occasions she would rank as an “HRH.”

THE QUEEN FOUND blessed relief from her family travails when Nelson Mandela arrived for a triumphant four-day state visit on Tuesday, July 9. Tens of thousands of spectators—the biggest crowd for a foreign visitor in decades—turned out to cheer the African leader as he and Elizabeth II were driven by carriage to Buckingham Palace after the ceremonial welcome on Horse Guards Parade. At the state banquet that evening, the seventy-year-old monarch paid tribute to the seventy-seven-year-old South African leader as the savior of a country that “has a special place in my heart and in the hearts of the British people.” Her praise for his wisdom and understanding after suffering twenty-seven years in prison was borne out three days later when he met for twenty minutes with his former adversary, Margaret Thatcher—in the spirit, he said, of “let bygones be bygones.”

Instead of the traditional “return” dinner at South Africa House on Thursday night, Mandela chose to bend protocol by hosting a “Two Nations” concert at Royal Albert Hall. Prince Charles helped organize the event starring Phil Collins, Tony Bennett, and Quincy Jones along with Hugh Masekela and other prominent South African musicians. Mandela, who was well known for dancing to the toe-tapping rhythms of South African music, sat with the Queen, Philip, Charles, and other members of the royal family in the royal box. At intermission he took aside Robin Renwick (Baron Renwick of Clifton), who had served as British ambassador to South Africa. “Should I dance?” Mandela asked. “By all means,” said Renwick. “What about the Queen?” said Mandela. “You should do it,” replied Renwick. “Don’t worry.”

When the all-male a cappella singing group Ladysmith Black Mambazo began performing, Mandela, dressed in a black silk shirt, stood up in the royal box and started to dance. Philip tentatively rose to join him, followed by Charles, swaying and clapping along with the music. “To everyone’s surprise,” said Robin Renwick, “the Queen stood up and did a little side by side movement too.” As the Daily Telegraph noted the next day, Elizabeth II “has seldom been known to boogie in public.”

ON AUGUST 28, the Wales divorce became final, to the enormous relief of the royal family. But they had not anticipated that Diana had every intention of staying in the limelight. She forged a strategic new alliance with Tony Blair, leader of the Labour Party and candidate for the general election to be held in 1997. Early in the new year they met quietly at several private dinner parties where the dynamic young politician took Diana’s measure. He was mesmerized by her beauty and charisma, and she offered him advice on photo opportunities for his political campaign, speaking in “fairly calculating terms of how she had ‘gone for the caring angle.’ ”

Blair welcomed her “radical combination of royalty and normality … a royal who seemed at ease, human, and most of all, willing to engage with people on an equal basis.” At the same time he could see that she was “an unpredictable meteor” who had entered the royal family’s “predictable and highly regulated ecosystem.” Although she didn’t specify her political inclinations, he sensed her “perfect fit” with his plans for the Labour Party “in temperament and time, in the mood she engendered.”

Just as Diana created a less formal royal style, Blair flouted political convention by seeking a “Third Way” that defied Labour orthodoxy. Fundamentally, they were both accomplished actors. “We were both in our ways manipulative people,” he later wrote, “perceiving quickly the emotions of others and able instinctively to play with them.” That chameleon quality served Blair well as he fashioned a campaign to defeat John Major’s steady but dull leadership. Blair’s “New Labour” agenda promised youthful vigor and modernization that incorporated market-based Conservative ideas rather than diehard socialism. On May 1, 1997, Labour won in a landslide, and Blair, who took office four days before his forty-fourth birthday, became the first prime minister to be born after the Queen’s accession.

Blair was the product of an upwardly mobile Scottish family. His father, Leo’s, adoptive parents came from the Glasgow shipyards, and his maternal grandfather had been a butcher. Leo worked his way through law school and became a barrister and law lecturer at Durham University in England before turning to Conservative politics—a career cut short by a crippling stroke.

He insisted on the best private education for Tony, sending him to Fettes College, a boarding school in Edinburgh known as the Eton of Scotland. Blair studied law at Oxford and did a stint as a barrister in London where he met Cherie Booth, an ambitious and skilled lawyer from Liverpool who became his wife. He took up Labour politics and won a seat in Parliament in 1983, casting himself as a reformer. Boyishly handsome with a gleaming smile—the Queen Mother slyly observed that he was “all teeth and no bite”—Blair attracted attention with his glib and earnest rhetoric, and he gathered support with his engaging personality. “He had the nicest manners of any prime minister I have come across, in Britain or anywhere else,” wrote conservative historian Paul Johnson.

In 1994, after the death of Labour leader John Smith, Blair revealed his toughness when he won election as leader of the opposition, cutting off his friend and colleague Gordon Brown, who had been lining up support for his own run. Brown accused Blair of “betrayal,” and Blair mollified him with an “understanding” that he would eventually make way for Brown to succeed him. The residue of that deal was a bitter animosity between the two politicians that lasted throughout the years they worked together.

Blair made a memorable appearance at Buckingham Palace for “kissing hands” on May 2, 1997. After receiving his instructions from the Queen’s equerry, he tripped on the edge of the carpet and fell upon the Queen’s outstretched hand he was supposed to brush with his lips. Scarcely missing a beat, Elizabeth II told him that he was her tenth prime minister. “The first was Winston,” she said. “That was before you were born.” Their conversation turned up with some dramatic embellishment in the film The Queen, which also accurately conveyed Blair’s extreme nervousness. “I got a sense of my relative seniority, or lack of it, in the broad sweep of history,” Blair recalled in a 2002 interview. “But it was immediately apparent, even at that meeting … she was someone who took every care to try to make sure that you were put at ease.”

After some twenty minutes of “general guff” about Labour’s legislative plans, a Palace aide brought in Cherie, a militant republican often derided for her failure to give the monarch adequate respect. “I can’t remember not curtsying,” Cherie vaguely recalled, “so I probably did.” The two women discussed the practical logistics of moving a family—the Blairs had three children at the time—into 10 Downing Street, the Queen “generally clucking sympathetically.” Elizabeth II “kept the conversation going for just the right length of time,” the prime minister recalled, until “by an ever so slight gesture, she ended it and saw us out.”

Elizabeth II had quietly celebrated her seventy-first birthday eleven days earlier at Windsor Castle. She went riding, entertained her ninety-six-year-old “mama” at lunch, and contemplated the beauty of the garden at Frogmore in the “hot spring sunshine,” as she described the day to Nancy Reagan.

At an age when most in her generation had settled into comfortable retirement and narrowing views, the Queen’s unique position required her to broaden her perspective to keep abreast of changes in the culture. On March 6, she had switched on the first royal website, containing 150 pages of information on the monarchy. She remarked that the Internet “opens the door to a huge range of knowledge which has no national boundaries.” Still, in other respects, as Blair observed, “there’s a bit of her that is very strongly unchanging”—mainly regarding traditions that preserve “the mystery and the majesty of the monarchy.”

One of the new prime minister’s ticklish early decisions had to do with the forty-three-year-old yacht Britannia. In a cost-cutting measure, the Major government had decided three years earlier to end the royal yacht’s service in 1997. The Tories had been reluctant to finance the necessary £11 million upgrading as well as escalating yearly maintenance costs. “A lot of people thought Britannia should be kept,” said a former senior Palace official. “A lot of people in the street thought it was important. It was a wonderful symbol of the monarchy.” Some argued that the yacht helped promote British trade around the world with its “Sea Days” for businessmen that brought some £3 billion to the Treasury from 1991 to 1995. But in the end, Britannia had come to symbolize politically incorrect extravagance and privilege at public expense, and the Queen told the government she was prepared to give it up.

Despite the political sensitivity, the Major government had nevertheless considered building a new state-of-the-art royal yacht that would be less expensive to operate, and the Ministry of Defence developed plans with an estimated cost of £80 million. When Blair attended the ceremonial handover of Hong Kong’s sovereignty to the People’s Republic of China on June 30, 1997, he was impressed with the value of having a floating embodiment of Britain. After the Union Jack was lowered at midnight, Blair watched the floodlit yacht dramatically sail out of Hong Kong harbor. “What an asset,” he said. But his government soon scuttled any successor to Britannia—a decision that seemed small-minded compared to Blair’s own misguided construction project, the £750 million Millennium Dome, which came to symbolize pointless big-government excess.

That August the royal family took Britannia on its final Western Isles cruise on their way to Balmoral, a sentimental journey with the usual stop at the Castle of Mey. “Lilibet” and “Philip” put their signatures in the Queen Mother’s guest book commemorating Britannia Day for the last time, followed by Andrew and his two daughters; Anne and her second husband, Tim Laurence, with her son and daughter; Edward and his girlfriend Sophie Rhys-Jones; Margaret’s daughter, Sarah, and Sarah’s husband, Daniel Chatto; as well as Margaret’s son, David Linley, and his wife, Serena. The traditional luncheon was “somewhat melancholy,” but they all rose to the occasion with their usual ship-to-shore exchange of doggerel as Britannia, accompanied by two destroyers, steamed past the coast twice before disappearing over the horizon.

The Queen Mother’s verse was written by her friend Ted Hughes, Britain’s poet laureate, and said, in part:

With all our memories of you, so happy and dear

Whichever course your captain takes,

You steer into this haven of all our hearts, and here

You shall be anchored forever.

The Queen’s sixteen-line reply from Britannia to the Queen Mother’s “castellated pad” marveled:

Oh what a heavenly day, happy glorious and gay

Delicious food from the land

Peas shelled by majestic hand

Fruit, ice cream from foreign lands

Was it India or Pakistan?

AS THE QUEEN, her family, and friends fell into the leisurely pace of Balmoral life, they were confronted each morning with a display of newspapers on the drawing room table carrying stories of Diana’s escapades. Since the divorce, the princess had presented a brave face to the world, taking on important new causes such as banning the use of land mines. But her emotional life was more turbulent than ever as she attached herself to men who were increasingly unsuitable. She doted on William and Harry and tried to expose them to everyday life as much as possible, giving them, as she said in her Panorama interview, “an understanding of people’s emotions, people’s insecurities, people’s distress, and people’s hopes and dreams.” Yet she also began to burden her sons—William in particular—with too much information about her boyfriends and her problems.

She hit a new low in mid-July when she took up with Dodi Fayed, the son of Egyptian tycoon Mohamed Fayed, who had been repeatedly denied British citizenship by the U.K. government. Mohamed Fayed had befriended Diana as a generous benefactor of several of her charities. He appealed to her, according to Andrew Neil, a sometime consultant for Fayed, “by cultivating the idea that both were outsiders and had the same enemies.”

Diana met Dodi while she and her sons were staying at the ten-acre Fayed estate in Saint-Tropez. At age forty-two, Dodi was a classic case of arrested development: spoiled, ill-educated, unemployed, rootless, and irresponsible, with a taste for cocaine and fast cars. He showered Diana with extravagant gifts, including an $11,000 gold Cartier Panther watch, and sybaritic trips on his father’s plane and yachts. From the moment the story of their romance broke on August 7, the tabloids covered the couple’s every move with suggestive photographs and lurid prose. William and Harry, who were at Balmoral with their father, mistrusted Dodi, and they were embarrassed by their mother’s exhibitionistic behavior.

At around 1 A.M. on Sunday, August 31, a call came through to Robin Janvrin at Craigowan Lodge from the British embassy in Paris with a chilling message: Diana and Dodi had been in a horrific car crash in the tunnel underneath the Place d’Alma. Janvrin immediately hustled to Balmoral Castle for urgent conferences with the Queen, Philip, and Charles. Shortly after 4 A.M. they received word that Diana was dead at age thirty-six, along with her lover and the driver of the car.

They decided to let William and Harry sleep, and the Queen wrote a note to be shown to her mother when she awakened. At 7:15 A.M. Charles told his sons, then aged fifteen and twelve, about the tragedy. From that moment on, Elizabeth II alternated between consoling her two grandsons and working with her senior advisers to make arrangements for honoring their mother.

Robin Janvrin stayed with the Queen at Balmoral while her other courtiers set up a makeshift command center at Buckingham Palace in the Chinese Dining Room overlooking the Victoria Memorial. David Airlie called off his trip to Italy, Lieutenant Colonel Malcolm Ross, the comptroller of the Lord Chamberlain’s office, flew in from Scotland, and Robert Fellowes came down from Norfolk. At the same time, Tony Blair and his top aides began managing what they perceived as a “global event like no other” and a fast-moving crisis for the monarchy.

By the time Blair spoke with Elizabeth II that morning, the Palace had issued a terse statement: “The Queen and Prince of Wales are deeply shocked and distressed by this terrible news.” She told the prime minister she had no plans to say anything further about the deaths. Blair found her to be “philosophical, anxious for the boys, but also professional and practical. She grasped the enormity of the event, but in her own way, she was not going to be pushed around by it.” When Blair told her he planned to make a comment before church, she raised no objection. Reading from some scribbles on the back of an envelope, he indelibly called Diana “the People’s Princess,” described how he felt the public’s pain, alluded to “how difficult things were for her from time to time,” and applauded those who “kept faith” with the deceased princess.

His words were meant to be placatory, and in some respects they were, simply by filling a vacuum and crystallizing inchoate feelings of affection and loss. But the royal family thought that Blair’s choice of “People’s Princess” helped stir up rather than pacify public feeling. George Carey worried that the description might “encourage the temptation of some to make her an icon to set against the royal family. Those fears were to be realized that week.”

The Queen and her family attended the regular Sunday service at Crathie. No mention of Diana was made in the prayers, which is customary in the Church of Scotland, where the ministers “don’t pray for the souls of the departed, because God has discharged them,” said a former senior official in the church who has often preached at Balmoral. But the press chose to portray the omission as an insult to Diana’s memory, and criticized the Queen for taking William and Harry to church only hours after their mother’s death. “They handled it like ostriches,” said Jennie Bond of the BBC. In fact, the princes wanted the comfort of religion at that moment. By one account, William said he wished to “talk to Mummy.” Everyone including the boys behaved as the royal family always does, with stiff stoicism in the face of emotional pain, which prompted still more criticism for their seeming insensitivity.

At that point, the family withdrew from the public gaze. The Queen’s intentions were pure from the outset—the kind of “unstoppable mothering” she had shown Timothy Knatchbull after the Mountbatten bombing in 1979. She believed William and Harry should be kept in the Highlands for as long as possible, surrounded by those who loved them. Like their father, the boys had been imbued with an enjoyment of the countryside. The Queen made certain the princes could stalk and fish with their cousin Peter Phillips, and gather with the family on the hills for barbecues. “To take them away to have nothing to do in Buckingham Palace would have been horrible,” said Margaret Rhodes.

The Queen secured a Royal Air Force plane to fly Prince Charles, along with Diana’s sisters, Sarah and Jane, to Paris to bring back the princess’s body. Elizabeth II also asked that Blair meet the plane at RAF Northolt airport on Sunday afternoon. In recognition of the Queen’s wish that the late princess be treated like a member of the royal family, Diana’s coffin was draped with her own Royal Standard, an adaptation of the sovereign’s heraldic banner in red, gold, and blue.

Elizabeth II initially yielded to the wish of the Spencer family that Diana’s funeral be private, but after conferences with her advisers, she recognized the need to do something akin to a royal ceremonial funeral at Westminster Abbey—although not a full-blown state funeral. She was helped by Robert Fellowes, who brought his wife, Jane, and the rest of the Spencers around. The funeral plans for members of the royal family are not only exhaustively planned in advance, they have code names: London Bridge for the Queen, Tay Bridge for the Queen Mother, Forth Bridge for Prince Philip. But there were no plans in place for Diana’s funeral because she was no longer technically a member of the royal family. “We can’t look at the files,” David Airlie told his colleagues. “We have to do it de novo.”

Working throughout Sunday and long into the night, the courtiers at Buckingham Palace planned a funeral for the following Saturday that combined elements of the traditional and the modern: Diana’s coffin on a horse-drawn gun carriage (primarily so it could be seen better than in a hearse) with twelve pallbearers from the Welsh Guards, followed by five hundred workers from Diana’s charities instead of the standard military procession, which she would have disliked. “We wanted the people who had benefited from her charities, not the chairmen and trustees,” said David Airlie. “It was also important to bring a cross-section of the public not normally invited to the Abbey—the people Diana associated with.” Rather than a lying-in-state at Westminster Hall, the courtiers came up with condolence books for the public to sign at Kensington Palace and St. James’s Palace, where Diana’s body would rest privately on a catafalque in the Chapel Royal until the funeral.

Airlie phoned Janvrin at Balmoral early Monday morning to relay the outlined plan. By 9 A.M. the Queen had given her approval. “She was very happy with the charity workers,” recalled Ross. It would be “a unique funeral for a unique person,” the Palace announced.

The Lord Chamberlain supervised a series of meetings with all interested parties including the police and military as well as several of Blair’s key operatives specifically invited by Airlie. They hammered out the details for what the press was now calling the “people’s funeral,” including such unconventional touches as a solo by Elton John and a reading by the prime minister, while excluding such traditional fanfare as trumpeters and drums. By Tuesday afternoon they had written everything down and transmitted it to Balmoral so the Queen could “see the totality.” Again she approved their proposals readily and without discussion. “She is much better with paper, especially for something long and complicated,” said Ross. “She speed reads. She is very quick with paper.”

Contrary to popular mythology about hidebound courtiers, the Queen’s men showed flexibility and ingenuity that week. Airlie had been at the vanguard of modernizing Buckingham Palace operations for more than a decade. Robert Fellowes proved surprisingly “shrewd and savvy,” in Tony Blair’s view. Robin Janvrin was “completely au fait with where it was all heading,” Blair recalled. Even Alastair Campbell, the prime minister’s antimonarchist press spokesman, remarked that the courtiers “encouraged creative thinking and even risk-taking.” The Queen trusted them and responded decisively to such suggestions as doubling the route of the funeral procession to give greater access to the crowds and putting giant video screens in Hyde Park to televise the funeral.

But she dug in her heels over what she considered unreasonable demands from the press and public that violated deeply embedded traditions as well as her family’s wish to deal with the tragedy privately. By Tuesday it was clear that Diana’s death had triggered an unprecedented display of mass grieving by mourners who poured into London, by one estimate “at a rate of 6,000 per hour.” They heaped flowers, stuffed animals, signs, balloons, condolence notes, and other tributes along the railings of Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace, and they camped out in the parks, hugging and weeping as if for a close relative or intimate friend. By Wednesday night some three quarters of a million people had stood in line, some for more than ten hours, to sign the condolence books that multiplied rapidly from four to thirty-four in two days. It seemed as if Diana’s own displays of raw emotion—leading “from the heart not the head,” as she said in her Panorama interview—had prompted the citizenry to abandon the dignified restraint they had shown after the deaths of King George VI and Winston Churchill.

The crowds at first had vented against the tabloids, inflamed by Diana’s brother, Charles, Earl Spencer, who said hours after his sister’s death, “I always believed the press would kill her in the end.” Outside Kensington Palace on Sunday, mourners had shouted at a group of reporters, “Happy now?” But by midweek, the anger turned against the Queen for remaining sequestered in the Highlands and failing to acknowledge the pain felt by her subjects in London. “If only the royals dared weep with the people,” said The Independent in a critical editorial on Wednesday. “The media were circling, looking to blame someone other than themselves,” said one of Elizabeth II’s top advisers. “They needed to direct it at the other target,” Blair observed. “And to be fair, they were releasing genuine public feeling.” As a symbol of the Queen’s apparent indifference, the press focused on the empty flagpole above Buckingham Palace and demanded that a flag be flown at half-staff to honor Diana.

By centuries of custom, the only flag to fly at the Palace was the Queen’s Royal Standard, and only while she was in residence. It could never be flown at half-staff because once a monarch dies, the heir immediately takes the throne in an unbroken chain of sovereignty. But the crowds had no patience for such distinctions, and their mood verged close to mutinous. “I think the thing that impressed me most was the silence, which I found worrying,” said David Airlie, who took several walks outside the Palace.

On Wednesday the Queen’s London advisers suggested that she put aside tradition and fly the Union Jack at half-staff, but she was unyielding, as was Philip. “Robin had to describe the feeling in London,” said Malcolm Ross. “It was a torturous process because she felt so strongly. Robin said he metaphorically had blood pouring down his face because she had scratched his face metaphorically. He had to come back to her again and again.”

Later that day a Palace spokesman tried to defuse the growing pressure by saying that “all the royal family … are taking strength from the overwhelming support of the public who are sharing their tremendous sense of loss and grief.” Tony Blair publicly defended the Queen as well, although he knew, he later said, that “the fact that I was speaking only served to emphasize the fact that she wasn’t.” Reluctant to confront Elizabeth II himself and be “as blunt as I needed to be” with “very direct advice,” Blair called Charles, who said he would speak to his mother. Charles told Blair that he agreed the Queen could no longer “hide away” and needed to “come to London to respond to the public outpouring.”

There is a Brigadoon quality at Balmoral that makes it difficult to appreciate the emotional temperature 550 miles away. But the Queen had been willing on a number of occasions to fly south when duty called—to accept Macmillan’s resignation when he was hospitalized, to have lunch with Richard Nixon at Chequers, to greet her son Andrew at Portsmouth after the Falklands campaign, and to attend Bobo MacDonald’s funeral. Her unwillingness this time was impelled by a desire to shield her grandsons from further upset. For the Queen it was an ironic turnabout. After being criticized so often for putting duty over family, she found herself being pilloried for doing the reverse. “If she had come down, there would have been adverse press about the heartless grandmother leaving her grandchildren in a time of grief,” said Dickie Arbiter, a former press spokesman for the Queen.

The tabloids on Thursday morning turned up the heat with headlines screaming “SHOW US YOU CARE” (The Daily Express); “WHERE IS OUR QUEEN? WHERE IS HER FLAG?” (The Sun); and “YOUR PEOPLE ARE SUFFERING: SPEAK TO US, MA’AM” (The Daily Mirror). A survey by MORI (Market & Opinion Research International) found that 25 percent of the public felt the monarchy should be replaced, a significant rise from the 19 percent average dating back to 1969. Alastair Campbell called Fellowes and Janvrin to report that the mood on the street had become “dangerous and unpleasant.” “Robin Janvrin told me the Queen was composed but distressed by the way the nation assumed she did not care,” said George Carey. In a conference call that morning with the London team, the Queen grasped the gravity of the situation—not only that her absence was endangering the monarchy itself, but that she needed to fulfill her role as the nation’s leader in a time of crisis.

The vehemence of the press played a part in her decision, but more important was the persuasiveness of her advisers. Rather than traveling to London overnight by train for arrival shortly before the 11 A.M. funeral on Saturday, she and the family would fly down on Friday. That evening, she would make a televised speech, and she would pay her respects at Diana’s coffin in the Chapel Royal. Once she left Buckingham Palace on Saturday for the funeral, the Royal Standard would be lowered, and for the first time a Union Jack would rise on the flagpole, to remain at half-staff in tribute to Diana.

The Queen also asked Andrew and Edward to visit Diana’s coffin on Thursday afternoon and then walk among the crowds on the Mall back to Buckingham Palace—the family’s first overt gesture of public sympathy. The princes chatted with the mourners, who greeted them warmly. “It was an extraordinary experience feeling the atmosphere outside the Palace,” Andrew recalled. “It was unreal … completely unreal, beyond anybody’s expectation or understanding.”

At midday Blair called the Queen at her request so they could discuss the new plans. “It was the first time I’d heard him one on one with the Queen, and he really did the ma’am stuff pretty well,” recalled his press spokesman, Alastair Campbell, who was listening in. “He said he felt she had to show that she was vulnerable and they really were feeling it. He said, ‘I really do feel for you. There can be nothing more miserable than feeling as you do and having your motives questioned.’ ” Blair remembered that the Queen “was now very focused and totally persuaded. It wasn’t easy, but it was certain.”

That afternoon, Palace press secretary Geoffrey Crawford stood in front of St. James’s Palace to read an unusual statement that not only explained what would happen the next day, but displayed a new softness in describing the Queen’s feelings. “The royal family have been hurt by suggestions that they are indifferent to the country’s sorrow,” he said, adding that Diana’s sons “miss her deeply.” Crawford reiterated the wish of William and Harry to be in the “quiet haven” of Balmoral and the Queen’s efforts to help them “come to terms with their loss” as they prepared themselves “for the public ordeal of mourning their mother with the nation.”

Though she was willing to show some emotion in order to comfort her people, above all, Elizabeth II had to be a strong leader for her family as well as the nation. Her sister, Margaret, later thanked her for “how you kindly arranged everybody’s lives after the accident and made life tolerable for the two poor boys … there, always in command, was you, listening to everyone and deciding on all the issues.… I just felt you were wonderful.”

Philip suggested that on the eve of their return to London the family attend a service at Crathie. Unlike the previous Sunday, Diana’s name was mentioned by the minister, Bob Sloan, this time in a prayer of comfort for the grieving royal family. Afterward, they stopped in front of a horde of photographers at the Balmoral gates—the boys in dark suits and the men in their customary tweed jackets and tartan kilts—to inspect the flowers left by mourners. At 2:40 P.M. on Friday—five days after Diana’s death—Elizabeth II and Philip arrived at the Buckingham Palace gates, with the unannounced intention of making the same gesture.

When they emerged from their Rolls-Royce, the royal couple faced crowds extending twenty deep to the Victoria Memorial, and thousands of bouquets wrapped in cellophane heaped six feet high along the Palace railings. “There was a very ugly atmosphere in the crowd that was lining the Mall,” said assistant private secretary Mary Francis. Uncertain how the people would react, the Queen betrayed a trace of anxiety in her expression. As she and Philip walked toward the floral display, the crowd began clapping.

“It wasn’t completely over with, but you could feel the atmosphere change,” said Francis. One young girl held out a bouquet. “Would you like me to place them for you?” asked the Queen. “No, Your Majesty, they’re for you,” the girl replied. The Queen spoke to a few more women in the line of mourners, asking them questions (“Have you been queuing a long time?”), and leaning in to listen to their comments. “I just said how sorry I was,” recalled Laura Trani, a student from Hampshire. “I said that William and Harry were now her main concern. She must take great care of them. She said she would. She said it was so hard for them because they were so young and loved their mother very much.”

Inside the Palace, the Queen and Philip “spent a long time talking about what the mood was, and what was on people’s minds,” said Mary Francis, “wanting to understand but not quite being able to be just out there and mingle and hear as private individuals.”

Elizabeth II was preparing for her much awaited speech—only the second such special televised address of her reign (the first was on the eve of the Gulf War in 1991). She was meant to tape her remarks in the late afternoon for airing later that evening. “She knew it was something she should do,” said one of her senior advisers. “She was clear about what she wanted to say.”

Robert Fellowes had written the first draft, assisted by David Airlie and Geoffrey Crawford, and transmitted it to Robin Janvrin at Balmoral. In a collaboration similar to the Christmas broadcasts, the Queen and Philip discussed and amended the remarks with her senior staff. Like her annual telecast, her words would reflect her own views, not those of the government.

As she did with her Christmas message, the Queen sent the speech to 10 Downing Street as a courtesy. Both Blair and Campbell read the text, and Campbell suggested that the Queen say she was speaking not only as the Queen, but “as a grandmother”—one of the most affecting phrases, as it turned out. “There were some last-minute discussions about her precise words,” recalled Blair. “But it was plain from the language and tone that once she had decided to move, she moved with considerable skill.”

Late on Friday afternoon, the Queen’s advisers decided she would be more effective if she read the speech live. They also agreed—with encouragement from Alastair Campbell—to seat her in the Chinese Dining Room in front of an open window with the crowds outside the Palace as a backdrop. A technician placed an additional microphone adjacent to the window to capture the ambient murmur outdoors.

The Queen wasn’t a fan of live broadcasts—decades earlier she had switched to tape for her Christmas message—but always rose to the occasion when asked. Wesley Kerr of the BBC could hear her rehearsing from the TelePrompTer on an open line. “One run-through,” she said.

At 6 P.M. she appeared, bespectacled and perfectly coiffed, wearing a simple black dress adorned with a triangular diamond brooch, a triple strand of pearls, and pearl earrings. She spoke for three minutes and nine seconds, and the thousands of people behind her—walking about, sitting on the Victoria Memorial—lent a dramatic, almost eerie, touch.

Her speech was pitched perfectly: her mien sober, with just a hint of emotion. She said what she meant, straightforwardly and with no gush. She knew all too well Diana’s failings, and the damage she had done to her eldest son. But she also recognized that her difficult daughter-in-law had struck a chord with the public, and that elements of her approach—her informality and her empathy—had been a force for good.

Diana’s death had caused “an overwhelming expression of sadness,” she said. “We have all been trying in our different ways to cope.” Speaking “from my heart,” she praised the late princess as “an exceptional and gifted human being.” In an oblique reference to Diana’s emotional troubles, she said, “In good times and bad, she never lost her capacity to smile and laugh, nor to inspire others with her warmth and kindness.”

Elizabeth II said—no more or less than she felt—“I admired and respected her, for her energy and commitment to others and especially for her devotion to her two boys.” She emphasized that “we have all been trying to help William and Harry come to terms with the devastating loss that they and the rest of us have suffered.” Signaling her understanding of the need to adapt to changing times, the Queen said, “I for one believe there are lessons to be drawn from her life and from the extraordinary and moving reaction to her death. I share in your determination to cherish her memory.”

After thanking everyone for their outpouring of support and “acts of kindness,” she exhorted her viewers to think of Diana’s family and the families of the others who died in the accident, and to unite “in grief and respect” at her funeral. She closed in typically understated fashion, by thanking God “for someone who made many, many people happy,” a tacit acknowledgment that others may have been less than happy.

Reaction to the speech was overwhelmingly positive. The Queen’s long-ago arch-critic John Grigg, the former Lord Altrincham, pronounced it “one of the very best speeches” and said she had “stabilized the situation.” George Carey thought it “showed her compassion and understanding. It went a very long way towards silencing her critics and removing the misunderstanding that had developed.” Tony Blair considered the broadcast “near perfect. She managed to be a Queen and a grandmother at one and the same time.”

A dissenting view came from playwright and novelist Alan Bennett, who had cleverly portrayed the Queen in his play A Question of Attribution. Bennett found the broadcast “unconvincing” because Elizabeth II “is not a good actress, indeed not an actress at all.” He regretted that the Queen had not been directed “to throw in a few pauses and seem to be searching for words,” and expressed disappointment that “she reels her message off, as she always does.” The “difference between Princess Diana and the Queen,” he wrote, was “one could act, the other can’t.”

Yet the Queen’s inability to pretend, much less to prevaricate, has always been one of her greatest assets. After forty-five years on the throne, her character was clear as she sat in front of the television camera. Her uncomplicated authenticity made her words that much more powerful. “There’s no putting on of a face in order to be more popular,” said Simon Walker, who would serve as her communications secretary from 2000 to 2002, “because it just wouldn’t work.”

That night at dinner in Buckingham Palace, Prince Philip helped resolve one of the lingering questions about the funeral: would William and Harry follow the tradition of royal males and walk with their father and uncle Charles Spencer behind their mother’s coffin? Both boys, especially William, had been reluctant all week to commit to something so public. William had resisted mainly because he was “consumed by a total hatred of the media” after their hounding of his mother, according to Alastair Campbell. Palace officials feared that if the Prince of Wales walked without his sons, he risked “being publicly attacked,” Campbell recorded in his diary.

On Friday evening, Philip—who as a seventy-six-year-old former father-in-law had not been scheduled to walk—said to William: “If you don’t walk, you may regret it later. I think you should do it. If I walk, will you walk with me?” William and his brother unhesitatingly agreed. They would join the procession as it passed St. James’s Palace—a solemn row of four royal princes and an earl behind Diana’s coffin.

THE ATMOSPHERE ON the sunny morning of Saturday, September 6, 1997, was uncannily calm. Central London was closed to all traffic except security vehicles and cars transporting mourners to the Abbey, and airplane routes had been redirected. Over a million people lined the four-mile funeral route and filled the city’s parks. The crowds stood still and silent, making the clip-clop of the horses drawing the gun carriage all the more pronounced.

The funeral cortege headed down Constitutional Hill from Kensington Palace toward Buckingham Palace. In yet another surprise, the Queen led her sister and the rest of the family through the gates to stand near the crowd. As the gun carriage passed, Elizabeth II spontaneously bowed to Diana’s coffin. “It was completely unexpected,” said Mary Francis, who was standing nearby. “I don’t think there had been any discussion of it, certainly not with her advisers beforehand. But instinctively she had done it, and it was the right thing to do.” It was also a vivid demonstration “that there was already a readiness to be more flexible,” said Ronald Allison, the Queen’s former press secretary.

The royal family joined the congregation of two thousand inside the Abbey. Loudspeakers enabled the nearby crowds outside to hear the entire proceedings, which were also visible on the giant video screens. The television audience in Britain was an estimated 31 million, with 2.5 billion tuning in around the world. The service, presided over by the Very Reverend Dr. Wesley Carr, Dean of Westminster, and George Carey, Archbishop of Canterbury, was “unashamedly populist and raw with emotion,” Carey recalled. Diana’s sisters each read inspirational poems, and Tony Blair offered a somewhat overheated reading from First Corinthians. The musical selections were eclectic, from traditional hymns and an excerpt from Verdi’s Requiem to Elton John’s reworking of “Candle in the Wind” for “England’s Rose” and the haunting strains of a contemporary composition by John Tavener.

An unexpected flash point came toward the end of Charles Spencer’s eloquent and emotional tribute to Diana when he turned to the sorrow of William and Harry, pledging that the Spencers, “your blood family, will do all we can to continue the imaginative and loving way” their mother was raising them. The Spencers had no more claim as a “blood family” than the Windsors, and “those unnecessary words,” as Carey later called them, insulted the Queen, Prince Philip, and their family seated in a row of scarlet and gilt chairs next to Diana’s coffin on the catafalque. Even worse, as Spencer’s remarks echoed outside the Abbey, the crowd began applauding. “It sounded like a rustle of leaves,” recalled Charles Moore, the editor of the Daily Telegraph, who was in the Abbey. Members of the congregation picked up the clapping—itself a breach of Church of England practice—even William and Harry, although the Queen and Philip refrained from joining in. “It was a Shakespearean moment,” said Moore, “one family’s blood against the other. It was an incredibly powerful speech.”

After the funeral, the royal family returned to its Highlands redoubt. Tony and Cherie Blair arrived the next day. It was supposed to have been their first prime minister’s weekend at Balmoral, but under the circumstances they came only for luncheon with Elizabeth II and some of her friends. The Queen and Philip “were very kind,” Cherie Blair recalled, but not a word was spoken about Diana or the previous week’s earth-shaking events. Listening to the conversation about deer stalking, agriculture, and fishing, Cherie thought, “This is really weird. Yesterday at the lunch in Number 10 following the funeral, there I was sitting next to Hillary Clinton and Queen Noor of Jordan, talking about current affairs, and here I am today with our head of state talking about the price of sheep.”

The prime minister had his audience with the Queen in the drawing room. As he made the rookie’s mistake of trying to sit in Queen Victoria’s chair, he heard a “strangled cry” from a footman and saw “a set of queenly eyebrows raised in horror.” Blair was admittedly tense, and he later felt he had been presumptuous and somewhat insensitive in their conversation. When he spoke about possible lessons to be learned, he thought that she “assumed a certain hauteur.” But she acknowledged his points generally and he “could see her own wisdom at work, reflecting, considering and adjusting.”

Blair scarcely knew the Queen at that stage, so during the week after Diana’s death there had been fewer direct interactions between prime minister and monarch than was generally believed. Blair and his aides did not overtly stage-manage Elizabeth II and Philip, as depicted in the film The Queen. But they did help guide the family’s thinking through close coordination with receptive Buckingham Palace courtiers.

In part because Blair had come to know Diana personally, he understood her character and had more quickly grasped the impact of her death than either the Queen or her advisers. Sensing that the outpouring of grief was turning into a “mass movement for change,” Blair decided his job was to “protect the monarchy.” It’s impossible to gauge the degree to which his “People’s Princess” comment, however well-meaning, contributed to the volatile atmosphere. But had he been standoffish or negative, the monarchy would doubtless have sustained greater damage. Instead he tried to channel popular anger and recast the Queen’s image in a more positive way. The Queen’s courtiers were pivotal, but it also took Blair’s behind-the-scenes prodding, including his use of Prince Charles as an intermediary, to push the Queen into acting in a way that went against her grain. In her eighth decade, Elizabeth II had come to understand that she needed to loosen the grip of tradition to keep the monarchy strong.