Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

TWENTY-ONE

Long Live the Queen

THE ONLY OTHER SOVEREIGN IN THE HISTORY OF THE BRITISH MONARCHY to spend sixty years on the throne was Queen Victoria. In 1897, during the six-mile carriage procession that was the high point of her Diamond Jubilee celebration, Victoria, then seventy-eight, was so overcome by the tumultuous reception that she wept openly. “How kind they are to me!” she said repeatedly. Too infirm to walk into St. Paul’s Cathedral, she sat outside in her carriage for a brief service of thanksgiving, surrounded by clergy and dignitaries as the choir sang a Te Deum, followed by an unconventional exhortation from the Archbishop of Canterbury: “Three cheers for the Queen!” Victoria died at age eighty-one on January 22, 1901, after sixty-three years and 216 days on the throne—a record that Queen Elizabeth II would surpass in September 2015.

Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee was arranged with some concessions to her eighty-six years. She won’t cover the forty thousand miles overseas that she logged during her Golden Jubilee travels, but her tours throughout England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland will cover ten regions. Members of the royal family will visit all fifteen of the Queen’s other realms as her representatives. The plan has many of the same elements—parades, concerts, luncheons, dinners, garden parties, religious services, themed events, and fireworks—to capture the affection and admiration that have grown stronger since the last jubilee. “Her reputation now is as high as at any time since the golden early years when everyone was intensely loyal to the new Queen, and Churchill was flat on his back with admiration,” said Margaret Thatcher’s senior adviser Charles Powell.

Her regional tours will begin in May of 2012 following Accession Day on February 6, always a time of quiet commemoration for the Queen. The apex of the public celebration spans four days of events on the first weekend in June that includes national holidays on Monday and Tuesday. The timing of the Summer Olympic Games six weeks later promises to extend the festive atmosphere, and to give Britain’s athletes added incentive to win for their Queen as well as their country.

With the exception of security and a special grant from the Treasury of £1 million to cover costs such as additional staffing, funding for the jubilee has come from nongovernment sources, with broadcasters and private organizations underwriting concerts and other events. The Thames Diamond Jubilee Foundation organized and funded “the largest flotilla to be assembled on the river in modern times,” scheduled for Sunday, June 3. Featuring at least one thousand boats and covering seven and a half miles, the river pageant was designed to surpass the Silver Jubilee barge procession, which had only 140 vessels. At the head of the waterborne progress will be a special barge for the Queen and Prince Philip, modeled on an eighteenth-century royal galley and powered by oarsmen that London mayor Boris Johnson joked could be “oiled and manacled MPs.”

On Saturday she will celebrate by watching the Derby at Epsom, and Monday will feature a concert produced and financed by the BBC and attended by twelve thousand people chosen by lottery as they were a decade earlier. They will attend a garden party at Buckingham Palace, followed by the musical program, which will include selections from classical to popular. The Queen will again light a national beacon as others are lit around the United Kingdom and Commonwealth. The stage will have the Palace as its dramatic backdrop, stands will be built around the Victoria Memorial, and large video screens will be placed down the Mall.

On Tuesday the Queen will be honored at a service of thanksgiving at St. Paul’s Cathedral, and her carriage procession afterward will trace part of Queen Victoria’s route. None of the celebrations could be considered modest, nor will they be extravagant, in keeping with the Queen’s wishes to minimize the expenditure of public funds.

Planning for the jubilee began in 2009, which the Palace called its “ideas” year. The elements of the celebration were rolled out in a low-key fashion to tamp down expectations, as had been done for the 2002 festivities. The Queen’s advisers were mindful that opposition to the monarchy had dwindled considerably, and they were determined to keep it that way. “Republicanism isn’t even an esoteric political position in Britain these days,” wrote Times columnist Hugo Rifkind in 2009. “It’s barely even a political position at all.” Forty years after surveys about the monarchy’s popularity began in 1969, the Queen continues to enjoy an approval rating of around 80 percent.

Evidence of the monarchy’s strong emotional hold, not only over the British people but around the world, could be seen in the popularity of the Oscar-winning film The King’s Speech, the inspiring tale of how Elizabeth II’s father, George VI, overcame his stutter through perseverance and discipline. The film touched people’s hearts but also tapped into a yearning for the monarchy’s enduring values of duty, integrity, and courage. In one movie theater after another, audiences applauded after the final scene.

Intrigued by the response to the film, the Queen saw it in a private screening. “On the whole she quite liked it,” said Margaret Rhodes. “I’m glad she saw it. It’s always difficult to see your own parents depicted, but she wasn’t violently either pro or con. Obviously there were a few bits that were not characteristic, but she thought it was okay.”

A powerful source of the Queen’s success as sovereign has been her inscrutability and avoidance of controversy. With the exception of a few relatively inconsequential remarks over the years, her political views remained a matter of conjecture long after The Sunday Times tried to portray her as a soft Tory against Margaret Thatcher’s hard line. Sometimes she has hinted at progressive thinking: applauding the Commonwealth’s multilateralism and initiatives to combat climate change, and speaking of “redressing the economic balance between nations” in her Christmas speech in 1983 by urging prosperous countries to share modern technology with poorer countries. But even then, her public statements have been well within constitutional bounds, and congruent with her government’s policies. Above all, the arguments against the monarchy as antidemocratic and backward-looking have been overwhelmed by the Queen’s dependable and consistent presence—what David Airlie, her former Lord Chamberlain, calls “the sheet anchor in the middle for people to hang on to in times of turbulence.”

ON TUESDAY, MAY 11, 2010, Elizabeth II greeted her twelfth prime minister, Conservative leader David Cameron. At age forty-three, he was the youngest politician to take that office since Lord Liverpool was appointed in 1812. Born in the fifteenth year of her reign, Cameron was also junior by three years to Prince Edward, the Queen’s youngest child. She had first glimpsed the future PM when he appeared at age eight with Edward in a school production of Toad of Toad Hall. It was a remarkable trajectory from her first prime minister, who was born in the nineteenth century and served in her great-great-grandmother’s army.

Cameron made the time-honored trip to the Palace five days after the general election on Thursday, May 6, resulted in the first hung Parliament since 1974. The Tory party had won 306 seats, but it was twenty shy of the majority needed to govern. Labour tallied 258 seats, and the minority Liberal Democrats (the party created in 1988 when the Liberals merged with the Social Democratic Party) captured fifty-seven seats, placing their forty-three-year-old leader, Nick Clegg, in the role of power broker as he considered overtures from the two other parties. The Liberal Democrats were in many respects more in line with Labour, but Cameron moved more nimbly than Gordon Brown, offering terms for a deal that Labour couldn’t match.

At one point Brown’s chief negotiator, Peter Mandelson, sought advice from Private Secretary Christopher Geidt at the Palace, who said Brown had a “constitutional obligation, a duty, to remain in his post” until a new government could be formed. As the period of limbo extended through the weekend, Geidt made regular trips to 10 Downing Street to get briefings. “It was important for Geidt to be visible, and to show that he was very much there on behalf of the Queen,” recalled Brown’s press spokesman and Palace veteran Simon Lewis.

During his final encounter with Clegg on Tuesday, Brown said, “I can’t keep the Queen waiting. Make up your mind, Nick.” In the end, Clegg accepted what Cameron later described as “a big generous offer to have a coalition government” that included making the Liberal Democrat leader deputy prime minister. Still, the deal for the first two-party government since World War II was subject to ratification by Clegg’s party. When Cameron met with the Queen after Brown’s resignation, “I said I couldn’t be totally sure about what sort of government I was going to form,” he recalled. “I said that I hoped to form a coalition government but I might have to come back in the morning and tell her it was something rather different.”

Cameron was the first Old Etonian to become prime minister since Alec Douglas-Home left office in 1964. The new prime minister came from a wealthy family of bankers interlaced with aristocrats including the 7th Earl of Denbigh. His father, Ian, was a stockbroker who taught his son about coping with adversity. Born with severely deformed legs, Ian managed to play tennis and cricket, endured repeated surgery, and finally suffered through amputation, always steadfast and devoid of self-pity. After attending Heatherdown with Prince Edward, David went to Eton and graduated from Oxford with honors. He spent much of his early career as a backroom strategist for the Conservative Party and honed his ability to get his message across during seven years as a public relations executive at Carlton Communications, one of Britain’s leading media companies.

Once he was elected to Parliament in 2001, Cameron rose to the top in just four years, working to modernize the Tory party by emphasizing individual initiative as well as social justice while tackling government excesses. Handsome, easygoing, and quick on his feet, he struck the right notes in the way Tony Blair had done with the Labour Party. His wife, Samantha, the daughter of a baronet, cut a stylish figure, and they had three young children. The eldest, Ivan, born with cerebral palsy and severe epilepsy, was unable to eat on his own, speak, or walk. Although he required round-the-clock care (including twenty-six doses of medicine a day), the Camerons tried to include him in as many family activities as possible and expose him to the outside world.

In 2009, Ivan died at age six from the complications of his illness. Gordon Brown, who knew the pain of losing a child as well as caring for one with a serious chronic illness, spoke of his rival’s tragedy with unusual feeling on the floor of the House of Commons. Three months after her husband became prime minister, Samantha Cameron gave birth to their third daughter, although their happiness dimmed just two weeks later when Ian Cameron died of a stroke at age seventy-seven while on vacation in France.

David Cameron’s combination of matter-of-fact strength and ingenuous openness about his hardships simultaneously aligned him with the Queen’s instinctive stoicism and the post-Diana emotional accessibility she had come to accept as part of modern life. Aside from Cameron’s school days in the shadow of Windsor Castle, he and the eighty-four-year-old Queen found other common ground. He had grown up in the countryside, in a small village in Berkshire, where he enjoyed hunting and shooting. His father had a passion for horse racing, taking shares in several thoroughbreds. Like the Queen, the prime minister had a practical turn of mind, and spoke in an unusually forthright way for a politician. There was, in short, an ample comfort zone for the weekly audiences at Buckingham Palace, which Cameron could readily fill with self-deprecating humor and a companionable personality.

The coalition led by Cameron immediately had to come to grips with a brutal recession compounded by Labour’s legacy of government spending that had expanded from 40 percent of gross domestic product in 1997 to nearly half of GDP by 2010. The new government imposed cuts of nearly 20 percent across the board to slash a swollen budget deficit, and also raised taxes and tuition fees at universities. Students protested in the streets, but otherwise the British public endured the stern medicine after watching the economies of Greece, Ireland, and Portugal nearly collapse under the weight of unaffordable entitlements.

The royal budget was not immune from either scrutiny or action when the ten-year funding for the Civil List expired in 2010. During the twenty years since Margaret Thatcher fixed an annual stipend of £7.9 million to cover the Queen’s duties as head of state, there had been no increases. The original formula had been set higher than the Palace had budgeted because at the time inflation was running above 9 percent. With yearly inflation at a far more modest average of 3 percent through the 1990s, the Queen’s treasurer took the surplus cash and invested it in a rainy day fund that grew to £35.6 million by the end of the decade.

When the Thatcher agreement ended in 2000, Tony Blair froze the Civil List for the following ten years, assuming that the reserve fund would top off the rising costs of running the royal household. By 2009, yearly Civil List expenses had climbed to more than £14 million, largely due to inflation, requiring a £6.5 million annual supplement from the Queen.

When George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer, presented his report on royal finances in June 2010, he praised the “careful housekeeping” at the Palace over the previous decade and said that the freeze on the Civil List amount would need to continue for two more years, which would exhaust the Queen’s remaining £15.2 millon reserve fund. In addition, Elizabeth II planned to spend nearly £1.3 million of her more than £13 million personal income from her Duchy of Lancaster portfolio to support the official expenses of three of her four children and other royal relatives working for the “Firm.” (Charles spent £9 million on his “official duties and charitable activities” out of his Duchy of Cornwall income of £17.1 million in 2009.) The costs of security provided by the police and the military for the entire family and the palaces remained a closely kept secret; estimates put it at more than £50 million annually.

In October 2010 the chancellor announced that the Queen’s household had further agreed to cut spending for 2012 by 14 percent, in line with the government’s austerity budget. At the same time, Osborne unveiled a historic change in financing the monarch’s official activities that he had devised in collaboration with Palace officials. Starting in 2013 the Civil List and various government grants will be scrapped. The new arrangement will give the royal household a single Sovereign Support Grant based on 15 percent of net income from the vast Crown Estate portfolio of property and investments that has belonged to the monarchy since the eleventh century. The Queen’s income will be pegged to the profit from two years previously.

Osborne’s solution is elegant in its simplicity and pragmatic in its consequences. It restores to the monarch a portion of the Crown Estate profits that King George III had relinquished in 1760 in exchange for the Civil List stipend. It also removes the need to periodically negotiate a payment plan with Parliament “so that my successors do not have to return to the issue so often,” said Osborne. With its capital value of £7.3 billion, the Crown Estate’s projected net income in 2011–12 of some £230 million is expected to yield about £34 million in 2013 for the Queen’s official business and provide the government treasury with £196 million.

The new arrangement is meant to keep pace with inflation, and will place safeguards on the downside and limits on the upside so the income will not be “adversely high.” Critics have argued that the monarch would no longer be accountable to Parliament, but in fact the Palace agreed for the first time to yearly scrutiny by the National Audit Office, which will report its findings to Parliament. The new system will also permit the royal household to decide how to allocate resources rather than rely on separate dedicated funds for maintenance and travel. Shoring up aging infrastructure will be an urgent priority. Buckingham Palace has been losing pieces of masonry from its facade, and the roof over the ballroom has sprung leaks.

Aside from landmark events and regular entertainments like the annual garden parties, diplomatic receptions, and state dinners, the Queen had already begun paring expenses in various ways. The era of periodic grand balls for friends and family was long over. To recognize two of her ladies-in-waiting, Susan Hussey and Mary Morrison, for serving fifty years apiece, the Queen hosted a low-key private reception at Buckingham Palace in June 2010 called “A Century of Waiting.” She recycled her outfits regularly, and for a state visit to Slovenia in October 2008 she asked Angela Kelly to create a gown for the state banquet out of silver and gold brocade fabric that had been given to her during a visit to the Middle East two decades earlier—a gesture the Palace called “credit crunch couture.” In the autumn of 2010, Elizabeth II announced that she was canceling the annual Christmas party at Buckingham Palace, cutting an estimated £50,000 from her £1.3 million catering and hospitality budget. A headline in the Evening Standard captured the mood: “EVERYONE LOSES … EVEN THE QUEEN.”

THE ROYAL FAMILY’S relations with the press became less troublesome in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The main reason was the disappearance of a parallel court presided over by Diana that fed morsels of information to tabloid favorites. At the same time, the Palace had developed a more sophisticated view of the media. “We have no experts in royal history, but we understand the way the media works,” said one senior official.

Although Philip complained that the Queen read too many “bloody” newspapers, her daily habit has given her a good feel for the press. She had long since learned to sort out what was important and what was irrelevant, and how to distinguish between media opinion and public opinion. The Palace press office reached out to a greater cross section of “opinion formers” as well as local papers, and offered more frequent background briefings. “We are not about demystifying the royal family,” said one official. “It is about telling people what they do.”

As the circulation of newspapers dropped with the rise of the Internet, the Queen’s advisers realized they could get their message directly to the public—and particularly what Palace officials call “the space of young people”—through the monarchy’s website and its YouTube channel. Keeping pace with emerging technologies, the Palace launched its British monarchy Twitter account in 2009, although its use was confined to bulletins about the comings and goings of the royal family. By early 2011 there were more than 100,000 followers of the royal family on Twitter. Four months after its launch on November 7, 2010, more than 300,000 “likes” were registered on the Queen’s Facebook page.

But the social media only softened the lash of Britain’s national newspapers, which remained more influential than the press in the United States. In 2010 and 2011 their prime target was Prince Andrew, Britain’s special representative for trade and investment since 2001. His global peregrinations earned him the nickname “Air Miles Andy,” and he was severely criticized for his contacts with unsavory dictators in places like Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, not to mention the American billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, who had served time in prison for pedophilia. Reporters routinely questioned the value of Andrew’s unsalaried role, which cost the British government nearly £600,000 annually for overseas travel, hotels, and entertaining—plus his £249,000 annual allowance from the Queen to run his private office.

Government officials credited Andrew with helping British firms win multibillion-pound contracts for such projects as the Dubai metro and jet engines for Air Asia. His lobbying for British industry was most effective in Asia and the Middle East, where he was friendly with leaders such as Jordan’s King Abdullah II, with whom he hunted in Morocco and Tanzania. “It’s not about the power of royalty, it’s about personal relationships,” said Andrew. “If you know the right people you can have a positive outcome.… If you are competing with other countries, you have to deploy as many assets as you can. I am one of those assets.” Nevertheless, Andrew’s questionable associates and poor judgment disturbed the Queen and her advisers, and in July 2011 he stepped down from his job after serving for ten years. He still intended to promote British business, but on an unofficial basis, while focusing on helping develop apprenticeships for young people.

Andrew’s image had also been badly dented when his ex-wife got caught a year earlier exploiting her husband’s position in a mortifying episode that recalled the royal family’s misadventures of the late twentieth century. After their divorce in 1996, Fergie had been more than £3 million in debt, but she had returned to financial solvency by pursuing an array of lucrative business ventures. She even won the approval of her former mother-in-law, who included her in a weekend at Balmoral in August 2008 with Andrew and their daughters, Beatrice and Eugenie, the first time the outcast duchess had been to the royal Highland retreat since her hasty exit in 1992.

Fergie continued to maintain a profligate lifestyle, however, employing eleven full- and part-time staff, compared to Andrew’s five. Her finances began to implode again in 2009 as her income declined and her debts grew to more than £2 million. In the spring of 2010 the fifty-year-old duchess was in a desperate mood when Mazher Mahmood, the News of the World reporter who had entrapped Sophie Wessex nine years earlier, enticed Sarah into a sting by posing as an Indian businessman. With hidden cameras recording the meeting in a Mayfair apartment, Fergie sold access to her former husband in exchange for £500,000, including a $40,000 cash down payment that she carried off in a computer bag. She repeatedly emphasized that Andrew “never does accept a penny for anything” and said she only wanted “a lick of the spoon.”

In an effort to defuse the potential damage from the incriminating footage, which was an instant sensation on YouTube, Fergie quickly issued a statement saying she was “sincerely sorry.” She explained that her finances were “under stress,” but said this was “no excuse for a serious lapse of judgment.” Both she and Andrew said that he had been unaware of her contacts with the phony businessman. After consulting with the Queen, Andrew covered a portion of his ex-wife’s debts and helped her restructure the rest. That July Fergie fired all her employees and agreed to operate under the supervision of Andrew’s office.

The following month, the Queen and Philip gathered their children and most of their grandchildren (William and Harry were off on military duty) for a nostalgic ten-day Western Isles cruise aboard the Hebridean Princess to celebrate the sixtieth and fiftieth birthdays of Anne and Andrew. The guest of honor was eighty-three-year-old retired nanny Mabel Anderson, who lived rent-free in one of the Queen’s grace-and-favor houses in Windsor Great Park and remained close to her former charges, particularly Charles.

For the first time since the royal yacht was decommissioned in 1997, the family re-created Britannia Day by stopping at the Castle of Mey, where Charles customarily stayed in his grandmother’s faithfully preserved pale blue bedroom for a week at the beginning of August. On August 2, 2010, Charles assumed the role of his late grandmother and hosted the family for a tour of the castle, proudly showing off various improvements he had overseen—the new visitor center as well as the recently built turret in the southeast corner of the walled garden. The Queen queried the staff about visitor numbers, inquired about the new radiant heating on the ground floor of the castle, and climbed up the turret to look out at the Orkney Islands through a monocular. After their tour, the royal party sat down to the traditional lunch, which featured oeufs Drumkilbo, just the way the Queen Mother had served them.

IN HIS SEVENTH decade, Prince Charles had not only found contentment in his new life with Camilla, but fulfillment in the job he had invented to give meaning to his role as heir to the throne. The Prince of Wales doggedly promoted a wide-ranging agenda embracing architecture, historic preservation, the environment, sustainable farming, rain forest conservation, health, education, and job training. A number of his views, such as the value of organic produce and the need for human-scale architecture to build new communities, were initially derided but later moved into the mainstream. He raised more than £110 million each year for his personal charities, which have extended his reach to projects in China, Afghanistan, Guyana, and Jamaica.

He had grown more comfortable in his own skin and committed himself to establishing his legacy through the job that, as he frequently said, “I made up as I went along.” “He has made a full life for himself,” said Nancy Reagan. “He does so much more than any previous Prince of Wales.” Yet his approach to his role is diametrically opposed to his mother’s more deliberate operation at Buckingham Palace. Much of what the Queen does she is advised to do, while her firstborn son tends to do mainly what he wants to. Charles “is high octane because he is so driven,” said one of his aides. “He is always at full tilt.”

The differences in temperament between mother and son are striking. “He is probably an instinctively glass half empty person, while she is more a half full one,” said her cousin Margaret Rhodes. The Queen “has no illusions about what can and can’t be changed,” said her former press secretary Charles Anson. “She has an acceptance of the way life deals its cards that is rare in the Western world, and stems partly from her religious conviction and partly from her life experience.” Prince Charles is more emotional than the Queen, easily offended and short-tempered, with an inclination to brood and to need reassurance. “Camilla soothes things and anticipates what could go wrong,” said Anne Glenconner.

He is more impressionable than his mother, and over the years was influenced by gurus such as Laurens van der Post and the mystical poet Kathleen Raine. But while the Queen can be persuaded by a well-crafted proposal, Charles dislikes advice contrary to his beliefs. There are few, even among his close friends, who feel comfortable challenging him for fear of being judged insensitive or disloyal. His father, by contrast, welcomes robust argument. While Philip can squash an opponent on occasion, he is more than happy to accommodate the views of someone he feels has mastered his brief.

Charles is also less direct than either of his parents, who can be counted on for a straight answer. “You sense he maneuvers,” said a longtime friend of Camilla. “People have to maneuver with him.” Charles enjoys gossip more than the Queen (although she likes political scuttlebutt) and wonders whether “that person is for or against me, in this or that camp,” said one of Elizabeth II’s former advisers. “The Queen doesn’t think that way. It is more, ‘What is the problem? What do we do?’ She only wants to know who is in what camp if it is obstructing a decision that needs to be taken.”

No one would deny that the Queen sets high standards for her household, but Charles is more extravagant. Elizabeth II knows what everything costs and economizes when necessary. Guests at routine Buckingham Palace receptions are served wine, potato chips, and nuts, while at Clarence House they get gourmet hors d’oeuvres, and the dinner parties have elaborate floral displays and theatrical lighting. “It is fair to say when he feels something should be done well, he doesn’t stint,” said Patricia Brabourne. When he goes to stay at Sandringham for a week on his own, Charles brings along vans filled with vegetables and meats from Highgrove, even though there is a farm on the Norfolk estate. At dinner parties, he is known to eat a different meal from his guests, sometimes with his personal cutlery.

Such behavior may seem persnickety and spoiled, but Charles has a capacity for empathy that was underestimated in the Diana era. His ability to engage with people is “as good if not better than the Queen,” said a former courtier. “He has natural warmth with the Queen’s sense of duty and Philip’s ability to make a guy laugh.” He is more imaginative and intuitive as well, and his thoughtfulness is legendary. When Anne Glenconner’s sister got cancer, Charles wrote her a seventeen-page letter with ideas about alternative treatments.

While the Queen has four private secretaries, Charles has eleven—nine full-time and two part-time—plus separate directors for each of the twenty charities he founded and a commercial enterprise that produces his Duchy Originals line of organic products ranging from Sicilian Lemon All Butter Shortbread to Mandarin Zest and Rose Geranium shampoo. All the profits, totaling more than £6 million in two decades, have been donated to charitable causes.

Along with Charles’s independence has come a boldness to proselytize for his causes in speeches, publications, and regular letters to government ministers in his distinctive scrawl. “There is nobody I admire more for his energy, ambition and enthusiasm,” said Sir Malcolm Ross, who served for two years as Charles’s Master of the Household after eighteen years in the senior ranks at Buckingham Palace. “He wants to save the world. The problem is he wants to save the world this afternoon and every other day.” In recent years Charles has urged that the global economic system be overhauled and questioned the values of a materialistic consumer society, denounced climate change skeptics, called for a “revolution” in the Western world’s “mechanistic approach to science,” and praised Islam for its belief that there is “no separation between man and nature.” He has twice taken on one of Britain’s most prestigious architects, Sir Richard Rogers, and derailed his multimillion-dollar projects for being incompatible with their neighborhoods, much to the relief of nearby residents.

His outspokenness has periodically put him at odds with his family, especially his father. After Charles first condemned genetically modified crops in 1998 for jeopardizing the delicate balance of nature, Philip vehemently disagreed on the grounds that such crops are necessary to feed the world. In 2000, when Charles intensified his attack on bioengineered agriculture, both his father and Princess Anne publicly took issue with his position, which his sister witheringly called a “huge oversimplification.” Philip pointed out in an interview with The Times that “we have been genetically modifying animals and plants ever since people started selective breeding.”

Tony Blair, whose government supported genetically modified farming, had already complained a year earlier to the Queen about Charles’s public pronouncements and had fumed to Alastair Campbell that the prince was using “the same argument that says if God intended us to fly, he would have given us wings.” The prime minister expressed his concern privately to Charles through cabinet minister Peter Mandelson that his remarks “were becoming unhelpful” because they were “anti-scientific and irresponsible in the light of food shortages in the developing world.”

The Queen has typically remained above the fray and avoided confrontation with the heir apparent. “She has allowed Prince Charles to work at his interests, his aims and his ambitions,” said Malcolm Ross. At the same time, she has found many of his ideas baffling, and has expressed concern to her advisers when he has become embroiled in public controversies. “It is not a cozy relationship, and never has been,” said Margaret Rhodes. “They love each other, but the family is not set up to be cozy.” In recent years tensions between the Queen and her heir have eased, and they regularly meet for a private dinner.

She has gradually called on Charles to share more of her duties, presiding over investitures, receiving dignitaries in audiences, and reading sensitive documents in his own dark green boxes. Palace courtiers anticipate that if Philip dies before the Queen, additional responsibility will shift to Charles, who will become more of a chief executive officer to his mother’s chairman of the board. “That will be a defining moment,” said one of her former advisers. “Prince Philip is such a part of her life and her role.”

Advisers who work with mother and son see contrasts in their approach to the duties a sovereign is expected to carry out. The Queen has investitures down to a science, allocating forty seconds to each of the nearly one hundred encounters during the hour-long ceremony in the Buckingham Palace ballroom. After a quick prompt from her equerry, she leans forward to present the insignia, smoothing the sash or ribbon, as Cecil Beaton once said, like a “hospital nurse or nanny.” Keeping eye contact, she smiles brightly, steps back, asks a question, and listens intently until her inner alarm sounds and she extends her hand to say goodbye. When Charles does the honors, he tends to linger and chat more, which lengthens the proceedings by as much as fifteen minutes.

Elizabeth II is more efficient, systematic, and disciplined than her son in other ways as well. She never falls behind on her official boxes, while he often does when he gets caught up in what one of his aides described as “furiously writing letters, rewriting speeches, and reading documents”—behavior the Queen would consider self-indulgent. (In 2009–10 he personally wrote 1,869 letters.) He avoids reading newspapers, a hangover from the Diana era, preferring to get daily reports from his aides and a digest of current events from The Week magazine, which the Queen worries will limit his knowledge, not to mention the perspective on the media she has developed through long experience.

At various times Charles has ruminated to friends and colleagues about the possibility of his mother’s abdication, once drawing a sharp rebuke from her in November 1998 when his press secretary, Mark Bolland, leaked to the media that the Prince of Wales would be “privately delighted” if his mother were to step down from the throne. When confronted by the Queen, Charles apologized and said the story was untrue. The idea of abdicating is anathema to Elizabeth II, who takes seriously her oath and anointment with holy oil during her coronation. When George Carey went to her in 2003 to say he was ready to retire as Archbishop of Canterbury, she sighed and said, “Oh, that’s something I can’t do. I am going to carry on to the end.”

The only caveat, as the Queen said to her cousin Margaret Rhodes, would be “unless I get Alzheimer’s or have a stroke.” “But even then she wouldn’t retire,” said Rhodes. If the Queen were incapacitated, Prince Charles would become Regent, acting on her behalf under the terms of the Regency Act of 1937.

In the royal tradition, the Queen, her husband, and her eldest son have state funeral plans with scripts they have approved. The name of Philip’s “Forth Bridge” plan derives from the bridge over the Firth of Forth in Scotland, Charles’s “Menai Bridge” is named after the span that connects the mainland of Wales and the island of Anglesey, and the Queen’s “London Bridge” is self-explanatory. All three plans are overseen by the Lord Chamberlain’s office and have similar elements stretching over nine days from death to burial, with processions, lying in state, and services mapped out. “The principals don’t tweak the plans,” said Malcolm Ross, who was involved in the preparations. “We report back to reassure them. The last thing they want to do is crawl all over their own funerals. They are more involved with the basics.” At least once a year, senior Palace aides talk through the arrangements and do tabletop exercises.

Although Edward VII, George V, and George VI had funerals at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, after lying in state at Westminster Hall, the Queen has planned her service for Westminster Abbey, where George II was the last monarch to have a funeral, in 1760. Both St. George’s Chapel and the Abbey are “Royal Peculiars,” which means they belong to the sovereign rather than a diocese. But according to a former senior Palace official, the Queen regards the Abbey “as the central church to her and to the Church of England.” Burial will be at Windsor, where her parents and her sister are interred at St. George’s Chapel.

When asked by NBC’s Brian Williams in a television interview in November 2010 what would happen when his mother died, Charles gave a tortured reply. “It is better not to have to think too much about it,” he said. “Except, you know, obviously, if it comes, then you have to deal with it. I think about it a bit, but it’s much better not. This is something that, you know, if it comes to it, and regrettably it comes as the result of the death of your parent which is, you know, not so nice, to say the least.”

In the same conversation, the Prince of Wales addressed for the first time the tricky matter of his wife’s status on his accession. When he married Camilla Parker Bowles, in 2005, Palace advisers finessed the question of her eventually becoming queen by saying she wished only to be “Princess Consort”—a title devised to placate those who still sympathized with Diana. As Camilla has conscientiously carried out her duties by his side, formerly hostile public sentiment about her years as Charles’s mistress has softened. Privately, he has indicated that he wants her to be his Queen Consort, just as his grandmother was for George VI. Anything less would constitute an unacceptable “morganatic” marriage of two unequal partners. “The settled rule and strong custom says the wife shall take the style and precedence of the husband,” said royal historian Kenneth Rose. “In settled law there is nothing to prevent Queen Camilla.” When NBC’s Williams queried Charles directly if Camilla would be queen, he replied, “We’ll see, won’t we? That could be.”

Unless he predeceases his mother, Charles will be the next head of state. The prospect of a King Charles III (or, if he were to choose one of his other names with happier associations, King George VII) raises several issues that could open the door to republican reformers. In the early years of the twenty-first century, both Labour and Conservative governments have raised the possibility of changing the 1701 Act of Settlement as well as the law of primogeniture, two vital underpinnings of the hereditary monarchy.

The eighteenth-century act was devised to guarantee a Protestant monarch by barring anyone in the line of succession from either being Roman Catholic or marrying a Roman Catholic. Advocates of altering the law contend that it is discriminatory, arguing that there is nothing to bar someone in the succession from marrying a Jew or Hindu or Muslim. As a practical matter, the act has worked smoothly for centuries and hasn’t prevented Catholics from marrying members of the royal family. In recent times, the Queen’s cousin, Prince Michael of Kent, removed himself from his distant position in the succession to marry a Catholic, while Peter Phillips’s wife converted to the Anglican faith so he could keep his eleventh place.

Overturning the Act of Settlement outright could challenge the legitimacy of the Queen and all other descendants of the House of Hanover, whose right to the throne was created by the law. (Several Stuart descendants live in Germany and could conceivably lay claim to the throne.) Even altering the Catholic exclusion would call into question the requirement that the sovereign be Anglican, since a central tenet of Catholicism is a pledge to raise children as Roman Catholics. A further complication is the prerequisite under the 1931 Statute of Westminster that any change in the act must have the consent not only of the British Parliament but of the other fifteen realms for which the Queen is head of state.

Primogeniture, which is based on common law dating to the Middle Ages, requires the firstborn son to inherit a family’s hereditary title and estate. In the monarchy, it means that males take precedence over females in the succession regardless of their position in the birth order. Among the Queen’s children, Charles became heir to the throne, followed by Andrew and Edward, with second-born Anne in fourth position. All three siblings were superseded by Charles’s two sons.

The marriage of Prince William gave new impetus to proposals that the crown go to the eldest child of the sovereign, whether a boy or a girl. Despite concerns that pulling out one strand from the laws of the monarchy could provoke additional constitutional questions, in October 2011 at the biennial conference of Commonwealth leaders in Perth, Australia, David Cameron secured the agreement of the Queen’s fifteen other realms to join Britain and introduce legislation to change the law of primogeniture to one of “gender equality.” Cameron also proposed amending the Act of Settlement to permit members of the royal family to marry Roman Catholics.

The Queen subtly signaled her approval in her speech opening the Commonwealth summit, urging the fifty-four nations to “find ways to allow girls and women to play their full part.” However, she has taken no official position on changing the laws, largely because the hurdles are high and the constitutional questions complex. “This is a matter for the government,” said a senior Palace official. “The monarchy is an institution which is great and solid and long-lasting. The framework has endured for centuries. It is not personal to her. She is a female monarch ironically as have been other great monarchs.”

Charles has said little publicly about his vision of kingship in the twenty-first century, but he has dropped some tantalizing hints. In 1994 he declared that rather than being the Defender of the Faith, he wished to be the “defender of faith,” in itself a difficult notion for a king pledged to uphold the Church of England as the legally established religion. Sixteen years later, he went further and said he was “absolutely determined to be the defender of nature.… That’s what the rest of my life is going to be concerned with.”

He has avoided discussing what if anything he would do to change the trappings of the monarchy, although he has indicated he would like to see the number of working members of the royal family decreased. There have been suggestions as well that he could keep Clarence House as his residence and use Buckingham Palace as his office, setting a more low-key tone. Courtiers have said he could cut back some of the ceremonial parts of the coronation while keeping its historical and religious elements intact, and that he might have a second service that would embrace other cultures and faiths. As for his closely tended charities, “obviously it would be nice if some things were taken on by my sons,” he said in 2008, “but I don’t know. It all depends on their interests.”

When Charles turned sixty in 2008, his biographer Jonathan Dimbleby wrote that he wanted to be an “active” king, ready “to speak out on matters of national and international importance in ways that at the moment would be unthinkable.” It would be a “waste of his experience and accumulated wisdom,” Dimbleby added, “for it to be straitjacketed within the confines of an annual Christmas message or his weekly audience with the prime minister.” When commentators in the press raised alarms, Clarence House officials hastened to say that Charles “fully accepts that as king, his power to discuss issues close to his heart would be severely curtailed.”

Yet Charles has signaled that he intends to do things “in a different way than my predecessors … because the situation has changed.” He has said he would use his “convening power”—the allure of a royal invitation to gather important people to discuss big issues and mobilize to solve problems. In an interview with Vanity Fair’s Bob Colacello in the autumn of 2010, he cited his education at Gordonstoun and Cambridge, saying, “Of course they really shouldn’t—should they—have sent me to a school which was precepted on taking the initiative. Or to a university where you inevitably look into a lot of issues. So it’s their bad luck, but that’s the way I intend to continue.”

Charles is difficult to pigeonhole politically. Tony Blair wrote that he considered him a “curious mixture of the traditional and the radical (at one level he was quite New Labour, at another definitely not) and of the princely and insecure.” He is certainly conservative in his old-fashioned dress and manners, his advocacy of traditional education in the arts and humanities, his reverence for classical architecture and the seventeenth-century Book of Common Prayer. But his forays into mysticism and his jeremiads against scientific progress, industrial development, and globalization give him an eccentric air.

“One of the main purposes of the monarchy is to unite the country and not divide it,” said Kenneth Rose. When the Queen took the throne at age twenty-five, she was a blank slate, which gave her a great advantage in maintaining the neutrality necessary to preserve that unity. It was a gentler time, and she could develop her leadership style quietly. But it has also taken vigilance and discipline for her to keep her views private over so many decades.

Charles has the disadvantage of a substantial public record of strong and sometimes contentious opinions, not to mention the private correspondence with government ministers protected by exemptions in the Freedom of Information Act that could come back to haunt him if any of it is made public. One letter that did leak was written in 1997 to a group of friends after a visit to Hong Kong and described the country’s leaders as “appalling old waxworks.”

Even if as sovereign he continues to advocate his views in what he considers a less provocative way, he still runs the risk of alienating some portion of the population. If that number approaches half or more, he could chip away at the consent necessary for the survival of the monarchy. He could come into conflict with government policy as well, politicizing his position and creating a constitutional crisis.

Many of his supporters hope that by the time he takes the throne—likely in his seventies if not late sixties, which would make him the oldest new monarch, superseding King William IV, who was sixty-four when he succeeded his older brother George IV in 1830—he will have had his fill of controversies and made his points, and will be ready to embrace his constitutional obligations. “With a bit of luck, he will be old enough not to be tempted down less wise paths,” said Robert Salisbury.

Veteran courtiers expect that the very act of becoming king will be transformative for Charles, instilling the solemn recognition that he can no longer act as an individual but as an institution representing the nation. “Life changes overnight when you inherit the throne,” said David Airlie. A diplomat who once worked with Charles on a government speech found that he was “not spoiled or stubborn” when it came to taking official advice. “When you tell him what he can’t do, he doesn’t like it but he will listen,” said the diplomat. “If you take out sections saying you can’t say this, it is not government policy, he gets cross but he goes along with it.” As Prince of Wales he has had the luxury of declining to shake the hand of a Chinese leader because of his poor human rights record, as he did when he refused to attend the banquet President Jiang Zemin had for the Queen during his state visit in October 1999. But as king “he will have to shake the bloody hand of murderous leaders if it is in Britain’s national interest,” said historian Andrew Roberts.

That task would include some heads of Commonwealth governments. Charles will not automatically inherit the job of head of the Commonwealth when the Queen dies. He must be voted in by the fifty-four-nation membership, which is by no means certain. A survey published in March 2010 by the Royal Commonwealth Society reported that fewer than 20 percent of those polled thought Charles should be the next head, and that many favored rotating the position among member states. “Whilst the vast majority of people greatly admire the role Queen Elizabeth II has played in uniting and guiding the Commonwealth,” wrote the authors of the study, “there is a significant debate about whether this role should be passed on to the next British monarch when the time comes. Many people are vehemently opposed to the idea.”

Charles considers heading the Commonwealth an important part of the monarch’s job, and he has cultivated his own relationships with member countries, visiting thirty-three of them since he became Prince of Wales. But he has attended the biennial heads of government meeting only twice, most recently in 2007 in Uganda when he joined his mother at the opening session. The Commonwealth’s director of political affairs, Amitav Banerji, indicated in a memo leaked in November 2010 that Charles did not “command the same respect” as his mother, but that the organization was “trying quietly to get him more involved.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That morning the Queen had given them the titles of Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. But even more significantly, they overrode protocol by announcing that they could be known by their own names as well. “It is absolutely natural that the public might want to call them Prince William and Princess Catherine,” said Paddy Harverson, press secretary to Prince Charles (technically, “princess” is used only for someone born a princess), “and no one is going to have any argument with that.”

At the heart of the celebration was the infectious joy of a young man and woman who both loved and understood each other. They showed a sense of restraint and respect for the monarchy’s one-thousand-year-old traditions, along with what Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, called a “deeply unpretentious” style. Standing at the altar in the dashing scarlet and gold-braided uniform of the Irish Guards, his regiment as an honorary colonel, William turned to Catherine when she reached his side. “You are beautiful,” he said, taking in her simple yet exquisitely detailed dress with bodice and sleeves of handmade lace, her gossamer veil, and the delicate diamond “Halo” tiara lent to her by the Queen. As they left the Abbey in the horse-drawn 1902 State Landau, Catherine said, “Well, are you happy?” “Yes,” replied William. “It was amazing. I’m so proud you’re my wife.”

The Queen also pronounced the service “amazing.” A vibrant figure in a buttercup yellow coat and matching hat, she had watched approvingly while keeping her emotions in check, seated in the front row below the high altar with Prince Philip in their wooden and gilded chairs with crimson silk cushions. The bride and groom radiated strength and stability under the scrutiny of forty television cameras transmitting their every expression and word to an estimated two to three billion viewers in 180 countries around the world. They were also being followed by 400 million people on the Internet, with 237 tweets per second.

The wedding service was unabashedly British and Anglican, and it dramatically displayed the royal family’s role as a repository of unself-conscious patriotic pride, providing a chance “for the nation to come together without partisan disagreement, without excuse for political discord,” wrote The Times. At a time of economic distress and low morale, “there was sunshine and laughter and happiness that everyone could join in.”

The year 2002 had been a turning point for the Queen, but 2011 was a turning point for the monarchy—the arrival of what David Cameron called “the team of the future” for an institution “that’s helped bind the country together” and “has produced incredible people.” Nobody made a direct reference to Diana in the Abbey, but her presence was inescapable, not only through the inclusion of a hymn from her funeral in the same setting, but the memory of William’s stoical sadness that day. Fourteen years later, he had found happiness as well as redemption, closing the book on a painful past.

The Queen was beaming during the six-minute appearance on the Buckingham Palace balcony when the newlyweds kissed not once but twice for the jubilant multitude around the Victoria Memorial. Elizabeth II modestly kept to one side, but when it was time to go, she took charge and led the Windsors and the Middletons back inside. As in the Abbey, the atmosphere was surprisingly intimate in the vast state rooms, where the springtime floral decorations included cow parsley and daffodils from Scotland. “The venue was palatial,” said the author Simon Sebag Montefiore, “but really it felt as cozy, informal and effervescent as a traditional British family wedding.”

Few would have noticed that the Queen was recovering from a cold that had been bothering her earlier in the week. One who knew was John Key, prime minister of New Zealand. During a visit with her at Windsor Castle two days earlier, he had given her a jar of his country’s manuka honey, which is known for its infection-fighting properties—a thoughtful gesture that she mentioned to a number of guests at the reception. In New Zealand the popularity of William and Catherine had sparked an impressive surge of support for the monarchy. More than half of the country’s adults watched the royal wedding, and a new poll indicated that only 33 percent expected New Zealand to vote out the monarchy, compared to 58 percent in 2005.

The Queen made no public remarks at the reception, but both future kings spoke from a dais in the Picture Gallery. Charles said he was “thrilled to have a daughter” who was his son’s “soulmate,” teased the groom about his hereditary bald spot, and said he hoped William would care for him in his old age, although he worried his eldest son might “push his wheelchair off a cliff.” William introduced “Mrs. Wales” as “a wonderful girl” with whom he was “in love.” He thanked his grandparents not only for “allowing us to invade your house,” but the Queen in particular “for putting up with numerous telephone calls and silly questions” in the weeks before the wedding.

At 3:30 on the dot, after all the guests had assembled in the garden, Catherine, still in her bridal gown, and William, now in a dark blue Irish Guards frock coat, climbed into Charles’s 1970 Aston Martin convertible, decorated with shiny balloons, ribbons, and a license plate saying “JUST WED.” They drove through the Palace gates onto the Mall for the short ride to Clarence House, as one of William’s Sea King helicopters hovered above, trailing a Union flag. The crowds exuberantly cheered as they passed. “William and Catherine were coming down to earth,” said Margaret Rhodes. “They were like an ordinary couple driving out in their little open car.”

By every measure, the wedding was the biggest media sensation of the twenty-first century, with nonstop coverage by six thousand accredited journalists and as many as four thousand unaccredited—numbers that astonished Palace officials, and the Queen as well. A million spectators hailed the royal couple on the streets of London and another 24 million in Britain watched on television, nearly 40 percent of the population of 62 million. In a YouGov poll taken for The Sunday Times, 73 percent of respondents said Catherine would help revivify the royal family.

Following the newlyweds’ ten-day honeymoon in the Seychelles, Catherine readied herself for a gradual adoption of royal duties with a limited number of charity patronages and official engagements. The couple agreed to make their first overseas tour together to Canada, the Queen’s largest realm, for nine days in July 2011, followed by three days in the United States, choosing California rather than Washington, D.C., or New York for their stay—another sign of their fresh approach. William and Catherine made clear their intention to live their own way as well as the royal way, in a Welsh farmhouse near his RAF base for at least two years without the customary domestic staff of valets and maids, and emerging periodically on the public stage. They deliberately chose a path that would allow them to enjoy the normal rhythms of married life while preserving the mystery necessary for the monarchy’s image.

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TWO WEEKS AFTER the wedding, the Queen made a historic state visit to the Republic of Ireland—the first since her grandfather, King George V, toured Dublin a century earlier when the country was still part of the United Kingdom. Thirteen years after the Good Friday Agreement was signed, Elizabeth II’s four days in Ireland were laden with symbolism. In her most resonant gesture, she silently bowed her head at Dublin’s Garden of Remembrance after laying a wreath, honoring those who had fought against Britain for Irish independence. She also paid homage to the nearly fifty thousand Irishmen who had died while serving with their British comrades in World War I and some seventy thousand who had volunteered in World War II despite Ireland’s official position of neutrality.

Elizabeth II moved with quiet dignity from one carefully chosen location to another amid massive security provided by ten thousand police and soldiers. She unflinchingly confronted her nation’s bloody past by visiting Croke Park, the stadium where British troops had fired into the crowd of five thousand at a football game in 1920, killing fourteen spectators in reprisal for the assassination of fourteen British undercover agents by an IRA hit squad. She toured historical sites, business enterprises, education and research institutions, and even three legendary stud farms in County Kildare. The Queen wore emerald green, the British flag flew, and Irish bands played “God Save the Queen” for the first time as leaders of both countries emphasized the value of reconciliation and the potential from strengthening Anglo-Irish ties.

Speaking at a state banquet in Dublin Castle, for centuries the headquarters for British colonial rule, the Queen began with an unscripted greeting in perfect Gaelic—the language once banned by the British—prompting Irish president Mary McAleese to mouth, “Wow, wow, wow,” and for the assembled luminaries to applaud. The relationship between the two neighboring countries had “not always been straightforward,” said the Queen, “nor has the record over the centuries been entirely benign.” She stressed “the importance of forbearance and conciliation,” and, in an echo of her earlier gesture, “of being able to bow to the past, but not be bound by it.”

She directly addressed the “painful legacy” of “heartache, turbulence and loss,” including events that touched “many of us personally”—a clear allusion to the assassination of her Mountbatten cousin. “To all those who have suffered as a consequence of our troubled past I extend my sincere thoughts and deep sympathy,” she said. “With the benefit of historical hindsight we all see things which we would wish had been done differently or not at all.”

Her restrained and subtle language was inherently powerful, and her manner was heartfelt. But the impact came mainly from the moral authority that the Queen has earned over her long reign. She didn’t need to issue an abject apology; with her words and her actions, Elizabeth II offered the Irish—and the British—a gentle catharsis. She “helped to release … sorrow for the sufferings of the past, relief that they are over, hope for a decent future,” wrote The Irish Times. Even Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political arm, praised the Queen’s “sincere expression of sympathy.”

Her trip to Ireland was hailed as one of the most significant of her reign. “I don’t think anybody could have achieved what she has,” said Elaine Byrne, a lecturer in politics at Trinity College Dublin. “It just seemed more personal and real.” The Irish people enveloped her with warmth and enthusiasm, marveling at her stamina for an octogenarian—her prolonged standing and her walking across distances and up steps with surprising agility—and pleased that she seemed to be having such a good time. At a concert in her honor, the audience gave her a five-minute standing ovation as she stood on the stage and smiled appreciatively. During her final rounds in the city of Cork, known for its history as a bastion of republican rebels, she took an unscheduled walkabout and greeted cheering onlookers, some even waving union flags. The Queen’s visit, said Byrne, “left us feeling a bit better about ourselves for the first time in a long time.”

Scarcely pausing to catch her breath, Elizabeth II entertained Barack and Michelle Obama at Buckingham Palace during a state visit the following week—the 101st of her reign. Obama had forged a warmer relationship with David Cameron than with his predecessor, and the British prime minister was eager to honor the American president as a sign of what the two leaders were now calling the “essential” rather than the “special” relationship. It was, as Obama himself acknowledged, a singular moment “for the grandson of a Kenyan who served as a cook in the British army.”

Security concerns caused the Queen to move the official arrival ceremony from the public setting of Horse Guards Parade to the privacy of the Buckingham Palace gardens. There was no white pavilion bedecked with flags and national insignia, nor even the usual entourage of dignitaries in ceremonial uniforms. Only the Queen, Prince Philip, Charles, and Camilla stood with the Obamas on the West Terrace overlooking the lawn. The band of the Scots Guards played “The Star-Spangled Banner” as a forty-one-gun salute boomed out in nearby Green Park, and the president inspected the guard of honor with Prince Philip.

In every other respect, the Obamas—with whom the royal couple had evident rapport—were treated to all the pomp of the traditional state visit: luncheon with the royal family, a display of historical documents in the Picture Gallery, an exchange of gifts, a state banquet in the ballroom, and two nights in the Belgian Suite among paintings by Canaletto and Gainsborough. (The Queen herself gave them a tour of their quarters.) The one unusual twist came just before the ceremonial welcome when the Obamas were escorted to the 1844 Drawing Room for a private twenty-minute meeting with William and Catherine, their first official appearance since the wedding. The encounter made headlines and reinforced the special status of the newlyweds—although they did not stay for either the luncheon or the banquet, where their presence could have overshadowed the guests of honor.

In June Elizabeth II celebrated the ninetieth birthday of Prince Philip—still largely defined in the press by his acerbic humor and outspokenness, although increasingly admired for the breadth of his interests and the extent of his contributions to a range of British institutions as well as to causes around the world. William and Catherine reappeared to attend the Queen’s private party for her husband at Windsor Castle. They also took center stage at Trooping the Colour, where William participated in the ceremonial parade on horseback for the first time.

While the Diamond Jubilee was not set to get under way for another year, the royal wedding of 2011 was a fitting prelude. It brightened the outlook for the House of Windsor, seventy-five years after destiny touched a ten-year-old princess and placed the burden of leadership on her small shoulders. Elizabeth II fulfilled her duty with steadfast determination and clarity of purpose, exerting influence without grasping for power, retaining her personal humility despite her public celebrity—and above all, in good times and bad, spreading a carpet of happiness.