Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

EIGHTEEN

Love and Grief

IN THE AUTUMN, WHEN THE QUEEN RETURNED TO LONDON, SHE could look forward to celebrating a happy occasion for a change: the opening of the magnificently restored state rooms at Windsor Castle in time for her golden wedding anniversary on November 20, 1997, five years to the day from the devastating fire. The prime movers behind the restoration were Philip and Charles, who worked together on a project that reflected their common interests in art, architecture, and design. They shared a passion for painting, and both favored landscapes. Charles worked in watercolors on a small scale in a soft palette with delicate brushstrokes, while Philip painted in oils, using vivid colors and bold strokes with a more contemporary feel.

Both men appreciated the sort of traditional approach to architecture and exacting standards of craftsmanship required for the ornate rooms at Windsor. Philip chaired the overall advisory committee for the massive project, which included restoring five state rooms to their previous splendor. Charles was in charge of a design subcommittee that focused on reimagining rooms in areas that had been destroyed. The Queen offered ideas to her husband and her son, and she made all the final decisions.

To replace the gutted private chapel, Charles supervised the neo-Gothic design of an octagonal Lantern Lobby and adjacent private chapel in medieval style. Philip’s sketches inspired the creation of the chapel’s new stained glass windows with images of a salvage worker, a firefighter, and St. George stabbing an evil flame-breathing dragon. When Philip disagreed with the proposal for a decorative floor in the Lantern Lobby that he thought would be too noisy and slippery, Charles came up with a compromise calling for a carpet woven with the Garter Star to be used when necessary. Charles also oversaw a “modern reinterpretation” of a medieval hammer beam roof in the majestic St. George’s Hall.

Originally scheduled to be completed by the spring of 1998, the restoration was finished six months ahead of time and came in £3 million under the estimated £40 million budget. The Queen marked the completion with a party in the restored rooms on November 14 for 1,500 contractors who worked on the project. During the reception, a Pakistani carpenter approached her and said, “Your Majesty, Your Majesty, please come with me. I want you to meet someone.” He took her over to his brother for an introduction. As she was chatting with someone else, the carpenter returned and again said, “Your Majesty, please come with me.” He then introduced her to a second brother who had helped carve the castle’s woodwork. Rather than being offended, she was amused by his enthusiastic audacity. Recounting the story to a senior Indian diplomat several years later in a flawless South Asian accent, she laughed and said, “I began to worry that he might have 12 brothers!”

The wedding anniversary commemoration reflected a reverence for tradition as well as a new openness adopted by the royal family after Diana’s death. On Wednesday, November 19, Philip paid tribute to his wife and family in a speech at a luncheon for the couple hosted by the Lord Mayor of London at the Guildhall. With the Queen seated next to him, Philip observed that “tolerance is the one essential ingredient of any happy marriage.… It is absolutely vital when the going gets difficult.” His wife, he said, “has the quality of tolerance in abundance.” Mindful of the family’s recent “tribulations,” he also singled out his children for praise, saying they “have all done rather well under very difficult and demanding circumstances.”

On the 20th, Elizabeth II and Philip attended a service of thanksgiving at Westminster Abbey, where they had walked down the aisle fifty years earlier. In addition to their four children and six grandchildren, the royal couple was honored by seven kings, ten queens, a grand duke, twenty-six princes, and twenty-seven princesses, as well as fifty other couples, all ordinary citizens, who were also married in 1947. With memories still fresh from Diana’s funeral eleven weeks earlier, there was an added undercurrent of solemnity, especially when William and Harry arrived with their father. In a “throat-catching moment,” George Carey blessed the Queen and Philip as they knelt before him. “I found myself wondering if our nation was actually worthy of their devotion and unflagging sense of duty,” the archbishop recalled.

The nod to modernity came afterward at a “people’s banquet,” a luncheon orchestrated in New Labour style and hosted by Tony Blair. Rather than having the royal couple at a head table on a dais surrounded by luminaries, the prime minister invited 350 guests from all walks of life and placed them at round tables without regard for rank or privilege. Dining with the Queen were an autoworker, a policeman, a jockey, and a maintenance worker, and she was seated next to a twenty-four-year-old leader of the Girl Guides.

In a speech at the luncheon, Blair thanked Elizabeth II anew for her conduct during “the terrible test” of Diana’s death when “hurtful things” were said. He understood “how moved you were by the outpouring of grief.… You sought, at all times … to help and do the best by the boys, and that is the way it should have been and was.” He affirmed his support for “a strong and flourishing monarchy” led by a Queen representing “those values of duty and service that are timeless.” It was on this occasion that Blair memorably hailed Elizabeth II as “a symbol of unity in a world of insecurity where nothing stays the same. You are our Queen. We respect and cherish you. You are, simply, the Best of British.”

In her speech, the Queen not only praised her husband but expanded on the notion of “lessons to be drawn” that she had first broached in her remarks about Diana. Surveying her five decades of married life, she remarked on such innovations as television, mobile telephones, and the Internet, which “to be honest” meant in her case that she had “listened to other people talking about surfing the Net.”

She reflected on the “huge constitutional difference between a hereditary monarchy and an elected government,” both of which depend on the consent of the people. “That consent, or lack of it,” she said, “is expressed for you, Prime Minister, through the ballot box. It is a tough, even brutal, system but at least the message is a clear one for all to read.”

For the royal family, “the message is often harder to read, obscured as it can be by deference, rhetoric or the conflicting currents of public opinion. But read it we must.” She said she had done her best “with Prince Philip’s constant love and help to interpret it correctly” and assured her audience that they would “try together to do so in the future.” She expressed gratitude for the support she received after Diana’s death. “It is you, if I may now speak to all of you directly, who have seen us through,” she said, “and helped us to make our duty fun.”

She closed with a frank but tender homage to Philip, who “all too often, I fear … has had to listen to me speaking.” She acknowledged his help in crafting her speeches—expressing his views “in a forthright manner.” Admitting his unwillingness to “take easily to compliments,” she said he had, “quite simply, been my strength and stay all these years, and I, and his whole family, and this and many other countries, owe him a debt greater than he would ever claim, or we shall ever know.”

The Queen’s marital milestone inevitably prompted speculation in the press about how much her celebrated tolerance had been tested. For years there had been rumors that Philip had a roving eye, and in 1996 author Sarah Bradford had stated flatly in her biography of the Queen that “Philip’s obvious flirtations and his affairs” had made “no difference to a marriage as firm and indeed fond as theirs.”

Philip had been linked to women in high aristocratic circles—usually close friends of the couple such as Jane, the Countess of Westmorland, who had been a great beauty; Penny Romsey, who often rode with the duke in carriage driving competitions; his (and the Queen’s) cousin Princess Alexandra; and Sacha Abercorn, wife of the 5th Duke of Abercorn, a contemporary of the Prince of Wales. In none of those cases was there any evidence of an affair.

Martin Charteris sought to put the gossip to rest shortly before the golden wedding anniversary in an interview with the Daily Mail’s Anne de Courcy. “I simply don’t know of anyone who has claimed to be his mistress or to have had a particularly close relationship,” he said in early November 1997. “If anybody had enjoyed such a relationship, do you think for one minute we wouldn’t have heard about it? He’s a man, he likes pretty girls, he loves fun. But I am absolutely certain there was nothing that would in any way have shaken that marriage.”

Patricia Brabourne, the royal couple’s Mountbatten cousin, subsequently explained Philip’s relationship with her daughter-in-law, Penny Romsey, by saying that she is “Philip’s great friend. The friendship there is largely based on their carriage driving. She goes and is visible.” Brabourne was also “absolutely certain” that he had been faithful to the Queen. “He would never behave badly,” she said. “He has always loved the Queen.… He wouldn’t want to do anything to hurt her.”

Sacha Abercorn spoke out as well, with the same objective of shooting down the rumors. She told author Gyles Brandreth that she and Philip had become friendly in the 1970s through their mutual interest in the writings of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, about whom they had “riveting conversations.” When Brandreth asked why she was seen holding hands with the duke on the island of Eleuthera, she explained, “It was a passionate friendship, but the passion was in the ideas.… I did not go to bed with him. It probably looked like that to the world … but it didn’t happen.… He isn’t like that.… He needs a playmate and someone to share his intellectual pursuits.”

The Queen, according to her cousin Pamela Hicks, “doesn’t mind when he flirts. He flirts with everyone, and she knows it means absolutely nothing.” She recalled the time Philip “bitterly said to my sister that he has never had an affair since he has been married.” He vehemently added, “The way the press related it, I had affairs with all these women. I might as well have and bloody enjoyed it.” Even biographer Sarah Bradford eventually backed off, telling The Times, “quite honestly, what real evidence is there? … The Queen relies on him tremendously. Through all those troubles they certainly did get closer. They are very close. They understand each other.”

THE ROYAL COUPLE said goodbye to one of the most visible emblems of their partnership when Britannia was decommissioned on December 11, 1997, in Portsmouth. (The yacht would later be made into a museum in Edinburgh.) Before the service, the royal family and courtiers went aboard for a last luncheon in the State Dining Room, with its long mahogany table, Hepplewhite chairs, and travel mementos, among them a narwhal tusk, a Sioux peace pipe, and a whalebone Philip had retrieved from a beach on Deception Island in Antarctica. The Queen and her entourage walked around her “country house at sea” and bid farewell to the ship’s company. “It was awful and she cried,” said one of her courtiers.

The quayside service, conducted by naval chaplains and attended by 2,200 former Britannia officers and yachtsmen, was seen by a television audience of millions. As the band of the Royal Marines marched away, they played “Auld Lang Syne” and saluted the yacht one final time. The Queen, dressed in red, raised a black-gloved hand to her eye and wiped away a tear. Some commentators in the press criticized her for weeping over a mere ship. But to the Queen and her family, Britannia held decades of memories. “It had not just been for work,” said a lady-in-waiting. “It had been their floating home.” More than anything, the royal yacht “represented freedom to her,” said one of the Queen’s relatives.

BY EARLY 1998 the royal household had begun to take concrete steps toward applying some of the lessons from the era of Diana. After support for a republic peaked in the days following her death, it dropped to 12 percent after the Queen’s televised speech, and in the following month it returned to around 19 percent, where it had been for three decades. But the volatility of opinion during that period sent deputy private secretary Robin Janvrin to visit Robert Worcester, the American expatriate professor who had founded the MORI poll.

Since Michael Shea’s appointment as press secretary to the Queen in 1978, her advisers had been periodically meeting with Worcester over lunch in London to pick his brain about trends in public opinion toward the monarchy. Now Janvrin told Worcester that he had a budget for private polling and wanted to hire MORI. In briefings at the Palace, the pollsters assessed support for the monarchy versus a republic by region, gender, age, social class, and other demographic characteristics. Through focus groups they also developed a list of ten attributes (promoting Britain abroad, importance to Britain, highly respected, supporting and promoting charitable institutions, hardworking, in touch with lives of ordinary people, well advised, good value for money, up to date, relevant) and assessed their relative importance to the public.

The two main concerns among the Queen’s senior counselors at the outset were that the monarchy was losing support among the young, and that the royal family was perceived to be “too myopic and inward looking.” In general, the research, which included some focus groups as well as traditional surveys, established that support for the monarchy is a stable and enduring value for the British people, transcending the headline of the moment—knowledge that gave the Palace greater confidence and enabled it to take a long view. The results of the private polling over the first several years also confirmed that while support for a republic among people in their twenties ranged from 28 percent to 35 percent, by the time they reached their mid-thirties, they would “revert to the mean” of 19 percent. “People start thinking about the future, about raising kids, living in a decent country,” said Robert Worcester. “That is why the monarchy is such a deep value and so consistent.” The most conspicuous area of weakness for the royal family was the perception that they were out of touch, which was held by more than a third of the British people when polling began in the late 1990s.

While Palace officials found much of the research reassuring, they began to develop strategies to respond to public opinion and show that the royal family was “in touch.” Surveys helped the Palace choose places the Queen should visit and themes for events she sponsored. They upgraded the press secretary’s job to “communications secretary” and recruited a public relations professional from British Gas, thirty-nine-year-old Simon Lewis, on a two-year secondment, with half his salary paid by his corporate employer. He first met the Queen and Prince Philip on a Friday afternoon at the end of May 1998.

“My abiding impression was how remarkably open they were,” Lewis recalled. “We had a discussion of what I would do and what the challenges were. It was more discursive than I had anticipated.” Lewis was struck “by the interaction between the two of them, how comfortable and easy they were, and how they had both thought about this role together. It was a very balanced discussion.” Philip in particular “had thought carefully about the communications area. The probing discussion was led by him. He was very interested in the nascent website, and he was pushing the idea of direct contact with the public. He had given up on the traditional media, which he thought was unwinnable. In his view, the only way was direct communication. I was impressed by how farsighted he was.”

The royal family began to manage its public duties more closely as well. In late 1994 David Airlie had started the Way Ahead Group to bring together the Queen, Prince Philip, their four children, and senior advisers twice a year to coordinate their plans. Now they focused on shaping the family’s activities to incorporate some of the best of what Diana had done, lessening the formality (instructing people before meeting members of the royal family that the bow and curtsy were optional), and consistently taking a more unassuming approach to public engagements—sitting down for tea in public housing projects, or walking around a classroom rather than peering in the door. “It is not heart on the sleeve or contrived,” explained one courtier. “But showing more empathy.”

The watchword became “imperceptible evolution,” based on an analogy that Robin Janvrin called “the Marmite theory of monarchy.” The salty food spread found in British cupboards for over a century has a distinctive red, yellow, and green label that is comforting in its familiarity. But only by comparing a fifty-year-old Marmite jar with one on contemporary shelves is it possible to see pronounced differences. The jar evolved so gradually and slowly that the changes were imperceptible. By Janvrin’s theory, the monarchy needed to change the same way—incrementally over time, small steps rather than large steps, so people were reassured that the institution was staying the same while adapting.

But Janvrin and his colleagues did make the occasional misstep, such as when they arranged for the Queen to greet people outside a McDonald’s restaurant in a display of populism. Determined to cast the visit in a poor light, the press ran photographs of her Rolls-Royce under the fast-food sign, making the appearance look contrived. Elizabeth II had a word with Robin Janvrin afterward, but she didn’t belabor the matter. “She has incredibly good instincts about how something will be perceived,” said Simon Lewis. “I was struck by her pragmatism and her sense of what would work. She has a finely tuned sense of the moment. On occasion ideas would be put to her and she would say, ‘We can’t do that. It’s far too grand.’ ”

THE FINAL YEARS of the twentieth century brought the Queen a new round of worries, this time about her mother and her sister. The Queen Mother was inevitably growing more fragile as she neared her hundredth birthday, although she still had her doughty spirit, refusing offers of a wheelchair and even balking at using a cane. “Time is not my dictator,” said the Queen Mother. “I dictate to time. I want to meet people.”

She continued her royal rounds even after she had her right hip replaced in November 1995. While visiting the Sandringham Stud in January 1998, she fell and broke her left hip, which required a second replacement surgery. At age ninety-seven, she made another remarkable comeback and appeared at the end of March at St. James’s Palace for her annual Clothing Guild meeting—the first of forty-six public engagements that year.

Margaret’s problems were psychological as well as physical. She had suffered from a range of ailments over the years—migraines, depression, bronchitis, gastroenteritis, and alcoholic hepatitis—resulting mainly from her excessive drinking and smoking. She had surgery in 1985 to remove a small portion of her lung. Although it wasn’t malignant, she had tried—unsuccessfully—to stop smoking, and she had cut back on her Famous Grouse whisky.

The two sisters kept up their daily phone calls, and when Margaret traveled overseas, she would call the Queen first thing on arrival. At Balmoral, Margaret “was almost like a poor relation,” said one courtier. “The Queen felt sorry for her.” “Sometimes Margaret was a very lonely person,” said her longtime friend Jane Rayne. “After Tony, then Roddy, no one else made her happy,” observed a man who was friendly with Margaret. “At dinner parties she would often indicate that I should drive her home. She would ask me in, and offer me a drink, then she would talk about all her personal problems.”

In late February 1998 Margaret suffered a mild stroke at age sixty-seven. She recovered well, although she showed signs of fatigue as well as forgetfulness. Almost exactly a year later, she badly scalded her feet while taking a bath in her house on Mustique. The Queen arranged for her to be flown by Concorde back to England, where she was treated at King Edward VII Hospital. Afterward she had difficulty walking and often relied on a wheelchair. There were other signs of decline as well. Since the early 1980s, Margaret had faithfully corresponded with Nancy Reagan, but in 1999 her lady-in-waiting Annabel Whitehead had to begin writing on her behalf.

As late as May 1999 the Queen was unsure whether her ailing sister could attend the wedding the following month of Prince Edward to thirty-four-year-old Sophie Rhys-Jones, a middle-class career woman who bore a passing resemblance to Diana. The daughter of an auto parts salesman and a homemaker, Sophie had grown up in the Kentish countryside and attended Kent College Pembury, a well-regarded girls school. After working in a variety of public relations jobs, she started her own firm in 1996. She met Edward while promoting a charity tennis tournament in 1993, and after dating for five years, they announced their engagement in January 1999.

Following the debacle of It’s a Royal Knockout, Edward had made a modestly successful career as a producer of films including documentaries on haunted castles in Wales, his great-uncle the Duke of Windsor, and the restoration of Windsor Castle. But as the last of the Queen’s children to marry, thirty-five-year-old Edward had also been subjected to such a persistent whispering campaign about his sexuality that Sophie herself denied publicly that he was gay. “How I’d love to be able to go out and sing from the rooftops: IT IS NOT TRUE,” she said. “I want to prove it to people, but it’s impossible to do that.”

Unlike the other royal siblings, Edward and Sophie had a relatively low-key wedding in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle on June 19 that they organized as much as possible on their own. The Queen gave them the titles of Earl and Countess of Wessex and set them up in a fifty-six-room Victorian house in Surrey called Bagshot Park that was criticized as excessive for their position in the royal family. They both continued in their jobs and were known professionally as Edward and Sophie Wessex, determined to combine royal life with everyday work.

ELIZABETH II LOST one of the stalwart figures in her life that December with the death of Martin Charteris at eighty-six. He had been diagnosed early in the month with advanced liver cancer and was immediately admitted to King Edward VII Hospital. While he was there, the Queen came for an hour-long visit. “They picked up right away on topics that were current,” recalled Gay Charteris. “They talked about all sorts of issues. I had never seen them talk that way together.” At no point did the Queen commiserate with her long-serving adviser about his terminal condition. “She knew that was pointless,” said his widow, “and that Martin wanted to talk about the kinds of things they had talked about when he worked for her.”

After three weeks, he left the hospital and died at his home in Gloucestershire on December 23. A year later the Queen invited the Charteris family to Windsor Castle for the installation of a cast-iron fireback that he had been sculpting in the last year of his life. He had died before finishing it, so a young sculptor at Eton completed the job. The design had all the royal emblems, and in a fanciful touch, three corgis as well. “I know if Martin had lived, one of the corgis would have lifted its leg,” said his widow. The Queen placed the fireback in St. George’s Hall, a reminder of the man who was her friend as well as her courtier.

TO CELEBRATE MILLENNIUM Eve on December 31, 1999, the Blairs invited the Queen and Prince Philip, along with Anne and her husband, to the vast Millennium Dome in Greenwich. Originally intended as an exhibition center that would symbolize New Labour’s “Cool Britannia” image, the dome had been plagued by cost overruns and poor planning. Tony Blair promised that the opening night extravaganza would be nothing less than “the greatest show on earth.” It featured acrobats in the nether reaches of the structure, a concert, and, shortly before midnight, a prayer read by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Alastair Campbell observed that Elizabeth II “at least managed the odd smile,” while the others “looked very pissed off to be there.” Anne, in particular, “was like granite.” One reason may have been the absence of heat, which caused the Queen, among thousands of other guests, to keep her coat buttoned. “It was pretty clear they would rather be sitting under their traveling rugs at Balmoral,” recalled Campbell. As the clock struck twelve everyone was expected to link arms and sing “Auld Lang Syne.” The Queen merely stared ahead and lightly clasped the fingers of Blair and Philip, who gave her a rare public kiss on the cheek. Even Blair called the touchy-feely moment “ghastly.”

Despite her obvious discomfort on New Year’s Eve, the Queen had established a fond relationship with Blair. She had presided over the opening of the Scottish Parliament and witnessed the establishment of the National Assembly for Wales—two essential pieces of New Labour’s program to devolve some legislative powers away from the British Parliament in Westminster after decades of nationalist pressure. “The Queen had a central role in the devolution process,” said Simon Lewis. “So it was important for her to be there and visible. As the country was changing, she needed to be seen to be involved.” In accepting devolution, she was careful to point out that politicians should be mindful that “the kingdom can still enjoy all the benefits of remaining united.… The parts are only fragments of a whole,” and with unity “we can be much more than the sum of those fragments.”

In the early going, Blair was not as assiduous about his weekly audiences at the Palace as he later became, and he was known to do an irreverent impersonation of Her Majesty: “Now Blair, no more of this people’s princess nonsense, because I am the people’s Queen.” In time, he developed a “high regard for her street smarts,” said Jonathan Powell, Blair’s chief of staff, and her skill “at assessing people and situations.” Blair recognized that she kept her finger “steadily on the national pulse—more, probably, than people would perhaps perceive.” “Her quality is the ability to get underneath what is happening,” Blair said. “It’s not just a question of knowing the facts on this and this and this.… It’s also being able to sense … the small p politics of something.”

Like his predecessors, Blair came to regard the Queen’s audience room as a sanctuary. “He was always working flat-out, one meeting after another,” said another of his advisers. “When he climbed into the car with his private secretary it was a moment for decompression. It was a time of tranquillity for him, to walk in and sit down and talk about what the Queen wanted to discuss.” He appreciated that she was “very to the point” and “very direct.” He learned, he later wrote, that “you don’t get matey with the Queen. Occasionally she can be matey with you, but don’t try to reciprocate or you get The Look.”

Cherie Blair mellowed in her view of the royal family after a rocky beginning in which she had frosty exchanges with both Princess Margaret and Princess Anne, who declined to call her Cherie because, said Anne, “it’s not the way I’ve been brought up.” “I have a soft spot for Prince Philip,” Cherie said. “He and I share a great interest in the Internet.” The prime minister’s wife enjoyed the barbecues at Balmoral that initially flummoxed her husband when “the person who you have grown up with as the Queen” was “fussing around you and looking after you.” Mostly Cherie was impressed by the way Elizabeth II played with the Blairs’ two-year-old son, Leo, during a visit to the Highlands, patiently teaching him how to toss biscuits to the corgis and reacting with benign tolerance when he threw a handful around the room.

Elizabeth II, as always, was circumspect about her own views of her tenth prime minister, although once when asked by a friend she said, “I think he’s in the wrong party.” “It was a throwaway observation,” explained her friend, “matter of fact, reflecting a common perception that he was not a traditional Labour Party figure.” Philip was predictably more outspoken, telling Gyles Brandreth that he was a modernizer but “not for the sake of buggering about with things in some sort of Blairite way.”

IN MARCH 2000 the Queen traveled to Australia for her thirteenth visit at a time of uncertainty in the country’s relationship with Britain. The previous November there had been a landmark referendum on the future of the monarchy. By 54 percent to 45 percent, Australians had voted to keep the Queen as their head of state despite opinion polls indicating strong republican sentiment. In the view of many observers, the people had rejected the republican proposal only because it advocated electing a president by both houses of parliament rather than directly by the country’s twelve million voters—reflecting more of a distrust of politicians than an endorsement of the sovereign.

When the Queen had greeted Martin Charteris in his hospital room a month after the vote, “the first thing they talked about was whether Australia would become a republic,” said Gay Charteris. Elizabeth II took the philosophical view that someday the British sovereign would no longer serve as the monarch of Australia. In a speech on March 20, 2000, at the Sydney Opera House, she struck a balance—on the one hand reminding her listeners that she had “felt part of this rugged, honest creative land” since she “first stepped ashore” in February 1954, while frankly acknowledging that “the future of the monarchy in Australia is an issue for you, the Australian people, and you alone to decide by democratic and constitutional means.” She pledged that “whatever the future may bring,” her “lasting respect and deep affection” would “remain as strong as ever.”

The well-being of her mother and her sister remained a major preoccupation for the Queen, especially when she was away for two weeks in distant Australia. “The Queen was always wondering if her mother would be all right, would she fall again, and that poor old leg was never healing,” said her cousin Pamela Hicks.

With the Queen Mother pointing toward her one hundredth birthday in August, Elizabeth II organized a series of unforgettable occasions. The first, a grand ball in the state apartments at Windsor Castle on Wednesday, June 21, also celebrated the seventieth birthday of Princess Margaret, the fiftieth of Princess Anne, and the fortieth of Prince Andrew. The list of more than eight hundred guests included European kings and queens, princes and princesses, leading figures from the British aristocracy, flamboyant international celebrities, and royal estate managers and horse trainers. Longtime royal nanny Mabel Anderson was there, along with Roddy Llewellyn and his wife, Captain Mark Phillips and his new wife, Sarah, Duchess of York, and Camilla Parker Bowles and her husband. Bars were set up in four different rooms, and three dance bands alternated in the Waterloo Chamber while a disco boomed in the Queen’s Presence Chamber.

There had been grumbling four years earlier when the press revealed that the Queen Mother was running an overdraft at Coutts bank of £4 million. Critics questioned the Queen’s acceptance of her mother’s extravagance, and the £643,000 allocated for her annual Civil List allowance. But few begrudged the ninety minutes of pageantry at Horse Guards Parade on July 19 in tribute to the Queen Mother’s century: a cast of thousands in a gaily costumed procession, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, servicemen, choirs, bands, bulls, sheep, chickens, horses, one hundred doves, and an aerial display by vintage RAF airplanes. Earlier that week there had been a service at St. Paul’s Cathedral and congratulatory messages from the House of Lords and the House of Commons.

Two weeks later on August 4, 2000, the day she turned one hundred, the Queen Mother rode with the Prince of Wales in a flower-bedecked carriage up the Mall to Buckingham Palace, where a crowd of forty thousand waited to cheer her arrival. “It was three years after the death of the Princess of Wales and I was struck by how far the monarchy had come,” said Simon Lewis. “I was standing in the forecourt at Buckingham Palace thinking, ‘If there was any question how people feel about the monarchy, there was a sense of joy that day.’ It was a tiny reminder that the institution had come through tough times and was in great shape.”

PLANNING BEGAN THAT summer for the Queen’s own celebration two years later of her Golden Jubilee, marking fifty years on the throne. The task fell to Robin Janvrin, who had taken over as private secretary when Robert Fellowes retired in 1999. The son of a vice admiral, Janvrin had graduated with honors from Oxford and served as an officer in the Royal Navy and as a diplomat before joining the royal household in 1987. Having witnessed some of the worst years of the Queen’s reign, he had become the leading modernizer among her top advisers.

His first recruit was Simon Walker, head of communications for British Airways, to replace Simon Lewis, who was returning to British Gas following his two years at the Palace. A South African by birth, Walker was outside the classic courtier mold, having worked not only in the Labour Party but for John Major in his last two years at 10 Downing Street. The Queen’s advisers wanted another press manager with an outside perspective and a more realistic idea of how stories would play. After a half dozen meetings with various officials in the household—mainly to determine if Walker harbored republican ideas—Janvrin said, “Only one person can decide if you are right for the job, and that is the Queen.”

Walker’s interview with Elizabeth II was late on a Wednesday afternoon in June 2000. She asked if he minded standing since she had been sitting for a portrait for three hours. As they talked, one of the Queen’s corgis insistently tugged at Walker’s trouser leg, which made standing still a challenge. The Queen didn’t try to stop the dog, nor for that matter did she seem to take notice at all, and Walker began to think that his ability to endure the distraction was meant to test his unflappability.

Their conversation was friendly and informal, and the Queen was well briefed. Her purpose was not to conduct the sort of forensic interview common in private industry, but rather to get a sense of how Walker might fit in and work with her. “There was definitely a subtlety to it,” he recalled.

Walker joined the household in September, when preparations for the Golden Jubilee got under way. He and his colleagues were mindful of “Millennium fatigue” created by Blair’s overhyped approach to the dome. “Under-promise and over delivery were seen to be critical to the Jubilee’s media prospects,” recalled Walker. The festivities would avoid simply copying the Silver Jubilee and its multitude of street parties, emphasizing instead inclusiveness to capture the multicultural changes that had occurred during the Queen’s reign. The focus would be on the Queen herself rather than on the institution of the monarchy, and communities of all stripes would be encouraged to celebrate in their own way, along with the major events forming the centerpiece of the official celebrations in London.

One striking emblem of the modern mood at the Palace was the portrait in progress on the day Simon Walker met the Queen. Of all the depictions of the Queen throughout her reign, it was one of the most controversial. The artist was Lucian Freud, widely regarded as Britain’s greatest living realist painter, and the grandson of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. The idea for the painting had come from Robert Fellowes, whose portrait Freud had painted in 1999. It was a risky commission, since Freud’s portraits (including the one of Fellowes) were often brutal, even grotesque images, rendered in thick brushstrokes. Freud said his goal was to produce “the interior life or ‘inner likeness’ behind such an instantly recognizable face.” For that reason, he remarked that his task was as challenging as “a polar expedition.”

Rather than working in the ornate Yellow Drawing Room at Buckingham Palace looking out across the Mall, where artists over the decades had painted the Queen, Freud insisted they meet in the Friary Court Studio at St. James’s Palace, a room used for painting restoration. He sat the Queen in front of a stark beige wall and had her pose in the diamond and pearl diadem shown on postage stamps and bank notes, which made an odd juxtaposition with her tailored blue suit and usual triple strand of pearls. From May 2000 through December 2001 he painted her in fifteen sittings, a source of frustration for the artist, who was accustomed to many more. At age seventy-seven, Freud worked with a vigor matching that of his seventy-three-year-old sitter.

Because of the diadem’s value, several protection officers stood guard in the studio with them, but Freud found their presence distracting, so the Queen asked them to go outside. She told the artist that she had met one of them while on a shoot at a friend’s estate. She was picking up as she always did when a wounded cock pheasant flew out of a hedge straight at her, flapping and clawing, and knocked her down. There was blood on her clothing from the bird’s scratches, and the detective standing nearby feared she had been shot. He threw himself on top of her and began giving her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. “I consider we got to know each other rather well,” she told Freud. Afterward, she hired the man for her protection force.

The Queen not only proved equal to Freud’s notoriously penetrating gaze, the artist shared with his sitter an enthusiasm for horses. He had been fascinated by the equine personality since his childhood, when he slept in the stables to be near the animals, and he had painted a number of arresting portraits of horses. “Lucian had a whale of a time with the Queen,” said his longtime friend Clarissa Eden. “They talked about racing and horses. She kept on saying, ‘We must stop talking. We must get on with this portrait.’ ”

MEMORIES OF THE unfortunate escapades of Elizabeth II’s children resurfaced in April 2001 when Prince Edward’s wife, Sophie Wessex, was entrapped in a sting by Mazher Mahmood, a reporter for News of the World impersonating an Arab sheikh interested in signing on as a client of her public relations firm. Mahmood secretly taped their conversation, and his newspaper ran the transcript in a sensational “World Exclusive.” The other tabloids reported incorrectly that Sophie called the Queen “an old dear,” the Queen Mother “the old lady,” Conservative leader William Hague “deformed,” and Cherie Blair “horrid.” She said none of those things, but she was indiscreet, telling the fake sheikh that the royal family referred to the prime minister as “President Blair because he thinks he is,” that Hague has “got this awful kind of way he talks.… He sounds like a puppet unfortunately,” and that John Major was “completely wooden.” She called the Labour budget “a load of pap,” and said its “increase in everybody’s taxes is something frightening.”

In an effort to prevent the publication of the transcripts, Sophie gave an interview to the newspaper, with the approval of the Buckingham Palace press office. That was when she denied Edward was gay, and she spoke as well of the pressures created by comparisons to Diana, usually unfavorable. “I have been reduced to tears,” she said. “I don’t deny that we do look alike, and it’s a huge compliment for me when people say that. But I couldn’t ever compete with Diana’s public image. I’m not Diana.” It was an excruciating experience for the novice member of the royal family, and she sent apologies to those she had insulted. But she not only remained in royal favor, she and her husband grew even closer to the Queen. “Sophie first of all respects her as the Queen, then as a mother-in-law, but she also understands that she is a human being and treats her that way,” said the Queen’s cousin Elizabeth Anson.

A few months later, the Queen entertained her tenth American president on July 19 when recently elected George W. Bush arrived at Buckingham Palace with his wife, Laura, for lunch before traveling to Genoa for the G-8 conference. Accompanying them was the Queen’s good friend Will Farish, the new U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. They alighted under the portico of the Grand Entrance, where they stood at attention for “The Star-Spangled Banner” expertly played by the band of the Coldstream Guards. As the forty-third president and the Duke of Edinburgh walked out into the quadrangle to inspect the guard of honor, it began to pour, soaking Bush’s trousers and shoes. Philip got a good laugh, but Elizabeth II tactfully refrained from comment. Ten years after their first meeting in his father’s White House, Bush felt a “natural connection” with the Queen, who created a relaxed and welcoming atmosphere.

The Anglo-American alliance deepened less than two months later when al Qaeda Islamist terrorists carried out the 9/11 attacks. The Queen was at Balmoral, and unlike the reaction to Diana’s death four years earlier, her reflexes were sure and swift. She issued a statement of condolence to President Bush expressing her “growing disbelief and total shock,” and she prepared to return to London for a special service at St. Paul’s Cathedral to honor the nearly three thousand victims, sixty-seven British citizens among them.

Malcolm Ross called Balmoral from London to ask that the Union Jack at Buckingham Palace be lowered to half-staff for the second time since Diana’s death (the Queen had authorized the same gesture of respect the previous October after the death of Donald Dewar, the first minister of Scotland). Ross also made the novel suggestion that at the next Changing of the Guard the American as well as British national anthem be played, with a two-minute silence between. The Queen instantly approved both proposals, and Robin Janvrin asked the American embassy to participate. That Thursday, two days after the attack, Will Farish and Prince Andrew stood at attention in the Palace forecourt as the Coldstream Guards band played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and a large crowd of spectators wept outside the railings.

The Queen suffered yet another loss on September 11 when her friend of many years, Henry Carnarvon, was stricken with a fatal heart attack at age seventy-seven. Like Elizabeth II and millions around the world, Carnarvon and his wife, Jean, had been watching television as the horrors unfolded in the United States. Just after the second hijacked airplane hit the World Trade Center, he collapsed. In the ambulance on the way to the hospital, he turned to his wife and said, “Would you call the Queen?” He died shortly afterward in the operating room, and his daughter, Lady Carolyn Warren, phoned Balmoral with the news. “The Queen was devastated,” said Jean Carnarvon. “It was so unexpected. It caught us all.”

On Friday, September 14, the Queen joined a congregation of 2,700, most of them Americans, at St. Paul’s Cathedral for a memorial service honoring the September 11 victims. Prince Philip read the lesson, and everyone sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which hadn’t been heard there since the 1960s when it was played for John F. Kennedy and Winston Churchill. “When our National Anthem was played, I watched the Queen as she sang all the words,” recalled Jackie Davis, the wife of an official at the American embassy. “I thought to myself, ‘If she can do that, then I can learn the words to “God Save the Queen.’ ”

On September 20, Tony and Cherie Blair traveled to New York to participate in another memorial for the victims at St. Thomas’s Church on Fifth Avenue. The prime minister did a reading from Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge at San Luis Rey, but “A Message from Her Majesty the Queen,” read by British ambassador Sir Christopher Meyer, most eloquently caught the intense sadness of the moment. Written by Robin Janvrin, it ended with what Bill Clinton called a “stunning sentence”: “Grief is the price we pay for love.” Those words were so evocative, and so true, that they were carved in stone not only at St. Thomas’s, but at a memorial in Grosvenor Square near the American embassy in London.

Tony Blair kept the Queen up to date on developments over the following weeks that led to the October invasion of Afghanistan by the United States, Britain, and other NATO forces. Their mission was to unseat the fundamentalist Muslim Taliban forces and root out the al Qaeda terrorists who had trained there for the devastating attacks. It was the first step in the global war on terrorism that escalated two years later with the invasion of Iraq and ouster of dictator Saddam Hussein, who was suspected of illegally making weapons of mass destruction intended for use against the United States and its allies.

From time to time during this period, Blair relied on the Queen for guidance. “Obviously there was a huge focus on the Arab world,” he recalled, “and that is something she has immense experience of. She has dealt with many of the royal families, with many of the ruling families, over a long, long period of time, and she has a lot of real insight into how they work, how they operate, how they think, the best way of trying to make sure that we reach out to them.”

LUCIAN FREUD UNVEILED Her Majesty the Queen at Buckingham Palace on December 20 and donated it to the Royal Collection in honor of the Golden Jubilee. Much of the reaction from the press was negative: “extremely unflattering,” said the Daily Telegraph; “a travesty,” pronounced The Sun.

The painting is shocking in several respects, starting with its size: only nine inches by six inches. Because it is so small, it is peculiarly concentrated, showing only the Queen’s head and a small part of her shoulders. Without the diadem, she would be barely recognizable. “You gaze at it for half a minute,” said Clarissa Eden, who was also painted by Freud. “Suddenly you realize it is the Queen.” Her face is harsh, the expression a scowl, the eyes hooded, the skin a rough patchwork of white and orange streaks, the heavy chin with a masculine five-o’clock shadow.

Yet despite Freud’s failure to show such attributes as her expressive eyes and luminous skin, he does capture in a mesmerizing way the essence of her dutiful and determined nature, as well as her strength and stoicism. “This is a painting of experience,” said Adrian Searle, art critic for The Guardian. So too is it an artwork of its time. “It could not have been painted ten years earlier,” said Sandy Nairne, director of the National Portrait Gallery since 2002.

Freud said the Queen looked at the portrait while she was being painted but she did not tell him what she thought. Sir Hugh Roberts, director of the Royal Collection, reflected the official Palace view when he called the portrait a “remarkable work.” Even more telling was a commentary by Jennifer Scott, the assistant curator of paintings for the collection, who wrote that it “feels real and earthy, almost as if Freud peeled away the layers of deportment that come so naturally to a monarch and painted the person underneath.”

CHRISTMAS AT SANDRINGHAM was unsettled that year. Margaret, now seventy-one, had suffered two more strokes in the beginning of 2001, leaving her partially paralyzed and bedridden as well as blind. When she made a brief appearance at the one hundredth birthday party for her aunt Princess Alice, the Dowager Duchess of Gloucester, on December 12 at Kensington Palace, Margaret wore sunglasses, and her face was swollen from steroid medications. Anne Glenconner, Margaret’s longtime friend and Norfolk neighbor, came to Sandringham and arranged to have a television installed in the princess’s room, along with a hot plate so her nurse could make scrambled eggs. “What a good idea!” the Queen said. Prince Charles was especially solicitous, sharing with Anne Glenconner the task of reading aloud to his aunt, who by then could barely speak. “Her quality of life was not good,” said Glenconner.

Four months past her 101st birthday, the indomitable Queen Mother was fading as well. She came down with a respiratory infection that kept her confined mainly to her room at Sandringham. In early February, Margaret was driven back to Kensington Palace, while her mother remained in Norfolk to recuperate. As the princess was wheeled to the car, the Queen Mother “carried out the family tradition of waving a white handkerchief in farewell.”

Accession Day, on February 6, was usually observed privately by the Queen. But to mark the fiftieth anniversary of taking the throne, she not only appeared publicly, she sent out a message of thanks with a modern twist—on the Internet through her official jubilee website. She started the day at Sandringham with an early morning ride, then traveled by car to nearby King’s Lynn to open a new cancer unit at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, where she talked to patients and toured the facility. Her visit was intended in part as a tribute to her late father’s struggle with lung cancer.

Two days later, Margaret had another stroke. After she showed signs of heart problems, she was rushed to King Edward VII Hospital late that night. With her son and daughter at her bedside, the princess died at 6:30 A.M. on Saturday, February 9. The Queen was at Windsor Castle, while Philip had stayed on at Sandringham for a shooting weekend. Charles immediately drove to Norfolk to console his grandmother. Resolutely positive as always, she told her grandson that her daughter’s death “had probably been a merciful release.”

Margaret’s funeral took place at 3 P.M. in St. George’s Chapel on Friday the 15th—fifty years to the day since her father, King George VI, was laid to rest. She had been eligible for a “royal ceremonial funeral,” but her wish was to “depart without a fuss,” so she requested a “royal private funeral,” by definition a less public ceremony. Unusually for a member of the royal family, she also requested cremation, with instructions that her ashes be placed with her father’s remains in his vault at the chapel.

The princess had selected the readings and the music for the service, which showed not only what her good friend George Carey called her “rooted and firm” adherence to the Church of England, but her love of ballet. As the 450 mourners entered the chapel, the organist played Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. The congregation included thirty-seven members of the royal family, and friends from show business such as actresses Judi Dench and Felicity Kendal. Roddy Llewellyn and Tony Snowdon were there as well.

The Queen Mother had fallen at Sandringham and cut her arm two days earlier. But she had insisted on attending the funeral, and the previous day had been flown to Windsor by helicopter. She arrived at the chapel by wheelchair after the Queen and was seated near her daughter’s coffin, which was covered with Margaret’s personal Royal Standard and arrangements of white roses and pink tulips.

Following the service, eight Royal Highland Fusiliers in tartan trousers and dark jackets carried out the coffin as trumpeters sounded “The Last Post” and “Reveille.” A bagpiper played “The Desperate Struggle of the Bird,” which seemed a suitably melancholy lament for a princess who had seen so much unhappiness. The Queen Mother managed to stand briefly as Margaret’s coffin passed, and she kept her emotions in check, but as the Queen stood outside the chapel watching the coffin being placed in the hearse, she lowered her head to wipe away tears. “It was the saddest I have ever seen the Queen,” said Reinaldo Herrera, Margaret’s good friend.

By the time family members joined Elizabeth II at the castle for tea afterward, she had regained her composure. She was already turning her attention to her departure in three days for Jamaica, the first stop on a two-week Golden Jubilee Commonwealth tour that would also take her to New Zealand and Australia.

“She went as scheduled,” said a member of the royal household. “You never would have known. She was doing her duty, smiling, laughing, engaged in everything. Maybe privately she showed her grief, but we didn’t see it.” The Jamaicans gave a flag-waving welcome to the woman known in the local patois as “Missis Queen” and “The Queen Lady.”

The crowds in New Zealand and Australia surpassed expectations as well. Sir Edmund Hillary, whose conquest of Mount Everest had coincided with Elizabeth II’s coronation, attended a garden party for her in Auckland and said, “Most people much prefer to have a Queen as head of state rather than a broken-down old prime minister.” In Queensland thirty thousand people stood in the rain to hear her remarks at the “people’s day” fair. When Queenslander Ted Smout told her he was 104 years old, she said, “Oh, my mother is only 101!” In private she talked “constantly” of Margaret, and she called every day to check in with her mother. On her return to England on Sunday, March 3, she went immediately to Royal Lodge for a visit.

NEARLY A MONTH later, she was back at Windsor for Easter weekend. The Queen Mother had become noticeably weaker, but she had been lucid enough in the previous week to call friends and relatives with various instructions that were meant to be final wishes. On the morning of March 30, 2002—Easter Saturday—the Queen was out for her customary ride when she received a message from the doctors attending her mother that the end was approaching. When Elizabeth II arrived in her riding clothes, the Queen Mother was in a chair by the fireside in her dressing gown. The two women exchanged a few private words, and the Queen Mother did not speak again. Shortly afterward she closed her eyes and fell unconscious as Canon John Ovendon, chaplain of the Royal Chapel of All Saints in Windsor Great Park, held her hand and prayed.

Elizabeth II went back to the castle to change and returned to Royal Lodge with Margaret’s children, David Linley and Sarah Chatto. The Queen Mother’s niece and close friend Margaret Rhodes was there as well. She lived nearby in the Great Park and had been faithfully visiting her aunt every day. At 3:15 in the afternoon the Queen Mother died peacefully at age 101, surrounded by her surviving daughter, her two grandchildren, and her niece, all of whom were crying. Tony Blair spoke to the Queen that evening and found her “very sad but dignified.” Prince Charles, who was in Klosters, Switzerland, on a skiing holiday with his sons, rushed to Windsor the next day to pay his respects to the grandmother he called “the original life enhancer.”

The Queen Mother’s “Tay Bridge” funeral plan unfolded as she had meticulously planned. By custom, it was not called a state funeral—reserved for reigning monarchs, with rare exceptions such as Winston Churchill—but a royal ceremonial funeral that was identical in its trappings. The Queen and her advisers were concerned at first whether there would be sufficient public interest to justify the nine days of official mourning, including three days of lying in state. These misgivings were prompted in part by modest-sized crowds outside Buckingham Palace and lines for the condolence books at St. James’s Palace, and by coverage in admittedly pro-republican newspapers such as The Guardian, which ran a headline on the day after the Queen Mother’s death: “UNCERTAIN FAREWELL REVEALS A NATION DIVIDED.”

By Friday, April 5, when the Queen Mother’s coffin was taken on a gun carriage in an elaborate procession from St. James’s Palace to Westminster Hall for the lying in state, the naysayers were proved wrong, as an estimated 250,000 people lined the route, in some places twenty deep. Draped over the coffin was her red, gold, white, and blue personal standard emblazoned with the familiar heraldic designs as well as bows and rampant lions from her family coat of arms. Resting on top was a wreath of white camellias bearing a card saying “In loving memory—Lilibet.” In front of the flowers was a purple velvet cushion holding the Queen Mother’s glittering coronation crown set with the legendary 105-carat Koh-i-Noor diamond.

The horses of the King’s Troop pulled the gun carriage, and 1,600 members of the armed forces representing regiments from Britain and the Commonwealth marched to the somber music of military bands accompanied by muffled drumbeats. Immediately following the coffin were all the male members of the royal family plus, for the first time, Princess Anne. Like her brothers Charles and Andrew, she wore a naval uniform with trousers, a privilege of her rank as an honorary rear admiral.

They met the Queen and Margaret’s daughter, Sarah Chatto, at the door of Westminster Hall, and the pallbearers carried the coffin to the seven-foot-high catafalque where George VI had lain in state five decades earlier. After the Archbishop of Canterbury conducted a brief prayer service for the family, the Queen and Prince Philip were driven back to Buckingham Palace. As she waved to the crowds, Elizabeth II’s expression was ineffably sad. As their car left Parliament Square and turned into Whitehall, the crowds of silent mourners unexpectedly burst into applause that continued along the Mall. “It was very emotional for her,” said one of her relatives. “It made her realize people really cared.” The Queen said that the moment was “one of the most touching things” that had ever happened to her.

When the soaring medieval hall was opened to members of the public, they stood in lines that stretched across the Thames and along the river’s south bank. After three days, more than 200,000 people—far more than expected—had filed past the catafalque to pay their respects. Officials had to extend the hours to accommodate as many mourners as possible. It was yet another dramatic demonstration of the monarchy’s entrenched popularity.

On Monday night before the funeral, the Queen gave a televised tribute to her “beloved mother” while seated in front of a window at Windsor Castle. Her message lasted just two minutes and fifteen seconds, but her voice was full of feeling as she spoke of her loss and her gratitude for “the outpouring of affection which has accompanied her death.” The extent of the tribute paid by “huge numbers of you” had been “overwhelming.” She hoped that at the funeral “sadness will blend with a wider sense of thanksgiving, not just for her life but for the times in which she lived.” And she expressed her thanks “for the support you are giving me and my family as we come to terms with her death and the void she has left in our midst. I thank you also from my heart for the love you gave her during her life and the honor you now give her in death.”

The Queen’s address was the culmination of a series of public gestures by the royal family to show their emotions in various ways. The previous Monday Prince Charles had given his own brief televised tribute from Highgrove, framed by photographs of the Queen Mother. He had struck an even more intimate tone than his mother’s as he catalogued the traits he adored in “the most magical grandmother you could possibly have.” He said he had “learnt so much from her of immense value to my life” and that together “we laughed until we cried—oh how I shall miss her laugh and wonderful wisdom born of so much experience and an innate sensitivity to life.”

Other members of the royal family also made an effort to connect with the public. Sophie Wessex, Princess Anne, her son, Peter Phillips, and husband, Tim Laurence, mingled with mourners waiting in line to visit the Queen Mother’s coffin. Just before the Queen’s broadcast, Princes Charles, Andrew, and Edward, along with Margaret’s son, David Linley, had stood at the four corners of the catafalque for a twenty-minute vigil.

The most unexpected response came from Princes William and Harry, aged nineteen and seventeen, who talked about the Queen Mother’s whimsical side in an interview. They described how they had taught their hundred-year-old great-grandmother to imitate Sacha Baron Cohen’s Ali G after she had watched the comedian on television. At the end of the family’s Christmas luncheon that year, she had stood up and declared, “Darling, lunch was marvelous—respec!” and clicked her fingers, Ali G style.

On Tuesday, April 9, Crown Jeweler David Thomas was up at 6 A.M. to clean and dust the crown on top of the coffin. A million people gathered along the funeral route, and more than eleven million watched on television. The congregation of 2,200 in Westminster Abbey included twenty-five members of European royal families, the Blairs, Thatchers, Majors, James Callaghan, First Lady Laura Bush, and United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan among numerous dignitaries. There were ordinary people as well who had known the Queen Mother through the more than three hundred charities of which she was patron or president. In the spirit of the Queen’s address, the midday funeral service combined solemn pageantry with reminders of how, “like the sun,” the Queen Mother “bathed us in her warm glow,” in the words of George Carey, the Archbishop of Canterbury. She embodied, he said, “one of the most fundamental of all roles and relationships—that of simply being a mother, a mum, the Queen Mum.”

A significant shift had taken place that week. For fifty years, Elizabeth II had deferred to her mother, and the object of that deference was gone. The Queen now took on the mantle of her mother’s role as well as her own. She moved up a generation and became the nation’s grandmother, or as Margaret Rhodes put it, “the senior royal lady.” Much as the Queen adored her mother, she had been slightly overshadowed by the Queen Mother’s merry and approachable presence, so beloved by the people. Elizabeth II had always been admired, but now the depth of affection for the Queen Mother began to merge with the equally deep respect for the Queen.

Still, the deaths of her sister and her mother within the space of six weeks gave seventy-five-year-old Elizabeth II “a terrible wallop of grief,” said Margaret Rhodes. “It was a huge thing,” said Elizabeth Anson. “The two people she talked to every day on the phone—neither of them was there.” The full impact of those losses—and of her altered relationship with the public—would become more evident later. In the meantime, Elizabeth II found solace in her duty.