Game of Crowns: Elizabeth, Camilla, Kate, and the Throne (2 page)

Kelly, eyes welling with tears, shakes her head as Big Paul approaches. He takes his first tentative steps into the room. Fittingly, the plaintive wail of a bagpipe wafts up from the courtyard below. Each morning at nine the Queen’s Piper, David Rodgers of the Irish Guards, stands outside the palace in full Royal Stewart tartan regalia and plays from a list of the monarch’s favorite tunes. Wearing the two feathers in his cap that distinguish him from all other pipers in the realm, Rodgers is the fourteenth soldier (and first Irishman) to hold the post since Queen Victoria decreed that every monarch should start each day to the sound of Scottish bagpipes. Wherever she is in residence—be it at Windsor, Sandringham, Balmoral, or Buckingham Palace—this is how the Queen begins each day.

But not
this
day. The heavy red velvet curtains that surround the royal bed have been drawn back to reveal a small, still figure. The Queen’s personal physician rushes into the room, and within moments the shadowy figure of Sir Christopher Geidt materializes in the doorway. Burly, bald, suave, shrewd, and more than a little mysterious, Her Majesty’s private secretary usually conceals his emotions behind a fixed, deceptively benign smile. Sir Christopher never tips his hand—a skill honed during years spent with British intelligence before being tapped to serve as an aide to the Queen.

At this moment, however, Geidt’s defenses are down. Like those around him, he is wide-eyed with shock and—despite the fact that this event had been anticipated and planned for decades—utter disbelief. The first call he must make is to Clive
Alderton, his counterpart at Clarence House, official residence of the Prince of Wales. Blond, boyish-faced Alderton, private secretary to the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall, cannot conceal the emotion in his voice when he is told the news. Alderton must now maintain his composure as he prepares to make the single most important phone call of his life.

“What is it, Charles?” Camilla pulls back the draperies that encircle her husband’s massive, ornately carved Georgian canopy bed. Like her mother-in-law, the Duchess of Cornwall has always preferred to sleep in a velvet and damask cocoon, closed off from the outside world. Unlike the Queen, who hadn’t shared a bedroom with her late husband, Prince Philip, for more than a half-century—in part because of Philip’s habit of sleeping with the windows wide open no matter the weather—Camilla and Charles make it uncomfortably clear to members of their inner circle that they still enjoy an active, even adventurous, sex life.

“It’s Mummy . . .”

He does not have to go on. Camilla recognizes the look immediately. She has seen the dazed expression cross Charles’s face only three times in all the years she has known him. The first time was in 1979, when the small fishing boat belonging to Charles’s great uncle and surrogate father, Louis Mountbatten, was blown up by IRA assassins, killing Mountbatten and three others. Camilla saw that expression of boundless grief again when, in 2002, the Queen Mother died in her sleep at age 101. Charles had been on a ski holiday with William and Harry at Klosters in Switzerland when it happened, but when he flew back to London Camilla would recall that “the look of great sadness was still there.”

And then there was August 31, 1997—the day Princess Diana
was killed in a Paris car crash. Charles was vacationing with the rest of the Royal Family at Balmoral Castle at the time, and Camilla was the first person he called with the terrible news. She could hear the anguish in the Prince’s voice as he, along with everyone else on the planet, tried to process what had happened.

Yet this moment—as fraught with historical importance as it is with deep shock, confusion, and grief—transcends all the others. It is the moment Charles has been both dreading and eagerly anticipating all his life—the moment when he loses the most important person in his life and, at the same time, at long last steps out of the shadows and into the part he was born to play.

At Anmer Hall in Norfolk, the Duchess of Cambridge is walking the family’s black English cocker spaniel Lupo when the housekeeper, Sadie Rice, strides briskly toward her with a cellphone in her hand. “It’s Prince William,” the housekeeper tells Kate, handing the phone to the Princess with one hand as she takes Lupo’s leash with the other.

The Duke of Cambridge is still in the middle of his shift piloting an Airbus H145 search-and-rescue helicopter for the East Anglian Air Ambulance, and Kate knows instantly that something must be terribly wrong; William has never interrupted his work to call her before. Moments earlier, the Prince was in the skies over Bedfordshire, transporting the victim of a motorcycle accident to Addenbrooke’s Hospital when his private secretary, Miguel Head, was patched through to the cockpit. Once Head told William his beloved “Granny” had passed away in her sleep, he continued piloting his helicopter to the hospital without saying a word to his fellow crew members.

Now William is flying back to his air ambulance home base
at Cambridge Airport, and sharing the terrible news with Kate. There is silence on the other end—all Kate can hear is the pulse of helicopter blades as William struggles to compose himself.

“It’s Granny,” he manages to say. “She’s gone.”

At Buckingham Palace, Geidt and the other “Men in Gray,” as Diana called them—the shadowy, behind-the-scenes figures who have always actually run the monarchy—have been carefully preparing for this inevitable event for decades. Only a handful of palace officials, along with their government counterparts at Whitehall, have been given access to details of the secret succession plan code-named “London Bridge.” More frequently referred to in palace corridors as simply “The Bridge,” this ostensibly referred to the funeral itself—but also to the momentous yet precarious transition from one monarch to another.

Once a year every year since the late 1970s, practice funeral processions for senior members of the Royal Family, such as Prince Philip, Prince Charles, and the Queen, have taken place in the streets of London under cover of darkness. Prince Philip, whose funeral plans were code-named “Forth Bridge” after the span over the Firth of Forth in Scotland, wanted only a private, military-style service at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle. Had Prince Charles predeceased his mother, his funeral plan, code-named “Menai Bridge” after the bridge that connects the island of Anglesey to the Welsh mainland, would have had all the pageantry of a royal funeral. But it would not have been a state funeral, for state funerals are reserved for the monarch. For her part, the Queen planned her own funeral down to the most minute detail—from the guest list, flowers, readings, and musical selections to which regimental units would participate and the color of their uniforms.

The media have long been preparing for this, as well. Every six months, they also practice announcing the death of the Queen. BBC anchors, remembering how newscaster Peter Sissons was upbraided for announcing the Queen Mother’s death wearing a light gray suit and a red tie, now are careful to keep a dark change of clothes at the ready, just in case.

Over the past two hours, the Palace has notified the Queen’s children and grandchildren. Geidt also places a call to 10 Downing Street, where an ashen-faced Prime Minister, whose weekly tête-à-tête with the Queen had taken place less than twenty-three hours earlier, immediately summons his ministers for an emergency cabinet meeting.

It is the cabinet’s job to convene an Accession Council—an assembly that includes privy council members, lords of the realm, high commissioners of Commonwealth countries and the Lord Mayor of the City of London—to formally proclaim the new monarch. The formality is just that, since the new sovereign takes over the moment the old one has died. The Accession Council will also formalize the new monarch’s name. As Charles Philip Arthur George, the Prince of Wales weighs several options, including being known as George VII or even King Arthur I. He has waited too long to make his own mark; as expected, he will go down in history as Charles III.

“Queen Elizabeth II is dead.” Although the Palace has made use of social media to promote the image of the monarchy, it uses a more traditional medium—television—to break the news to the British public. Despite all the speculation, the planning and preparation—or perhaps because of it—this new reality is hard to accept. After all, fully 98 percent of the earth’s population has only known a world with Queen Elizabeth in it.

The London Stock Exchange suspends trading. Flags around the world are lowered to half-staff. British television launches round-the-clock coverage, with all stations halting their regular programming to carry BBC-1’s live news feed. The BBC will not resume its normal broadcast schedule for days—the network has already announced that all comedy programs will be barred from its airwaves until after the state funeral. In their place will be several prerecorded packages on the life and times of the woman whose life spanned more than eighteen prime ministers, eight popes, and sixteen U.S. presidents.

For three days before her funeral, the Queen lies in state at the Houses of Parliament in Westminster Hall. The magnificent Imperial State Crown sits atop the coffin, which is draped with the blue, red, and gold harp and lions of the Royal Standard. An arrangement of carnations, the Queen’s favorite flower, also rests on the coffin, bearing a note with a single hand-lettered word:
Mama
.

Hundreds of thousands of mourners, many of them openly weeping, file past as Charles, his brothers Prince Andrew and Prince Edward (who assumed the title of Duke of Edinburgh on Philip’s death), and William and Harry all take turns standing guard by the Queen’s coffin in full dress uniform—what has come to be known as the Vigil of the Princes.

The day of the funeral is declared a national day of mourning, and an estimated 2 million people flood the streets of London to witness it. Never in recorded history have so many world leaders appeared in one place to pay their respects to a head of state. They fill the front pews of Westminster Abbey—where Elizabeth II is the first monarch to have a funeral since George II
in 1760—solemnly listening to the service being led by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

After the service, the gun carriage on which the sovereign’s casket rests is pulled not by horses, as would be the case for anything less than a state funeral, but by sailors of the Royal Navy—a tradition that began when, during Queen Victoria’s funeral, the horses bolted and sailors stepped in to pull the coffin along the processional route. Now, with the Queen’s equerries flanking the casket and members of the Royal Family walking behind, sailors pull the caisson carrying Her Majesty’s coffin from Westminster Abbey to Paddington Station for the trip aboard the Royal Train to Windsor Castle.

Once at Windsor, Great Britain’s longest-reigning monarch is interred at St. George’s Chapel alongside her husband, Philip, her father, George VI, the Queen Mother, her sister Margaret, and nine other sovereigns, including Henry VIII, Charles I, George III, and the last king to bear her grandson’s name—William IV.

Around the globe, an estimated 3.5 billion people are glued to hours of live coverage on television and the internet—a record-smashing figure that far surpasses the 2.5 billion viewers of Diana’s funeral in 1997 and the 3 billion people who watched William and Kate’s historic royal wedding in 2011. As was the case with Diana, the mood this time is one of deeply felt grief mixed with shock and disbelief. It is as if the entire planet is suddenly awakening to the fact that modern history’s most enduringly famous figure—a player on the world’s stage for five generations—has vanished.

There will be other, inevitably jarring changes to mark the
dawn of a new era. At sporting events, British subjects will now sing “God Save the King.” The Royal Mint and the Bank of England, as well as the Royal Mail, gear up to place Charles III’s likeness on all coins, paper currency, and stamps. Wherever the Queen’s likenesses have been displayed throughout the Commonwealth—from government offices and embassies to pubs, department stores, and souvenir shops—there will hang a photograph of the new king.

For Charles and Camilla, Elizabeth’s death also means a change of address. After several weeks, they move out of Clarence House to take up permanent residence in Buckingham Palace. William and Kate remain in Kensington Palace, leaving Clarence House to Prince Harry and his future wife and family. For those who have served the Queen at Buckingham Palace, in some cases for generations, it is not just her absence that weighs heavily. Something else is missing: Her Majesty’s corgis. She owned more than thirty during her lifetime, all descended from Susan, a Pembroke given to Princess Elizabeth on her eighteenth birthday. Over the years, several of the Queen’s corgis mated with Princess Margaret’s dachshund Pipkin to produce “Dorgis.”

The noisy, notoriously willful animals were always underfoot; at the Queen’s direction, they slept in wicker baskets just outside her bedroom door (occasionally they slept at the foot of her bed) and moved freely about the palace whether or not they were completely housebroken (footmen always carried blotting paper with them to do a quick cleanup in case one of the corgis had an accident).

The Queen went so far as to mix the dogs’ food herself whenever she could (they ate only when she gave the royal command) and carefully prepared Christmas stockings for them every year.
Ever mindful of the potential hazards to her pets, the Queen even carried a small magnet in her purse so she could pick up any stray pins or needles that might have been left on the floor after a dress fitting. Before any toys were given to the corgis, they first had to be personally inspected by the sovereign, who was known to pry a bell from a rubber ball or a noisemaker from a squeaky toy on the grounds that it presented a choking hazard.

To practically everyone but their owner, the Queen’s canine friends were the hazard. Paul Burrell, a footman who later became Diana’s butler and confidant, was knocked unconscious when nine leashed corgis tripped him up on the steps at Sandringham. “They’re yappy, snappy, and we bloody well hate them,” another footman declared. Diana, who made no secret of her dislike for this particular breed, called Her Majesty’s ubiquitous pets “the moving carpet.”