Game of Crowns: Elizabeth, Camilla, Kate, and the Throne (24 page)

At 6:30 p.m. on February 9, 2002, Princess Margaret died at King Edward VII Hospital after suffering the last in a series of strokes. Instead of consoling his mother at Windsor Castle, Charles rushed to the side of the Queen Mother at Sandringham. The indomitable Windsor matriarch managed to put a positive spin on her youngest child’s death. Earlier strokes and heart problems had rendered the once hard-living Margaret Rose blind and bedridden. The Princess’s death at age seventy-one, the Queen Mother said, was nothing less than “a merciful release.”

Six weeks later, on the afternoon of March 30, 2002, the Queen Mother was at Windsor for the Easter weekend when she suddenly grew tired. Elizabeth, who had been out horseback riding, was summoned to her mother’s side. When she arrived, the Queen Mother was dressed in a lounging robe, sitting upright in a chair by the fireplace in her bedroom. The Queen, still wearing her riding clothes and muddy riding boots, knelt by her mother’s side and exchanged a few words. Within minutes the Queen Mother lost consciousness. At 3:15 p.m., with Elizabeth weeping at her bedside, the Queen Mother slipped peacefully away.

The back-to-back losses of the Queen’s only sibling and her
mother were, her cousin Margaret Rhodes said, a “terrible wallop of grief.” The two family members she often spoke with several times a day—“gone. It doesn’t matter how old someone is,” Tony Blair said, “or how long you’ve had to prepare. It was a terrible shock.”

It was also another opportunity to show what a powerful unifying force the monarchy could be. The Prince of Wales took to the airwaves to praise his grandmother as “magical” and “fun—we laughed until we cried.” In a separate address to the nation, the Queen thanked her people for the “outpouring of affection” that was “overwhelming . . . I thank you also from my heart for the love you gave her during her life and the honor you now give her in death.”

More than a million people lined the funeral route from St. James’s Palace to Westminster Abbey. Inside, three present and future British monarchs—the Queen, Charles, and William—were among twenty-two hundred world leaders, crowned heads, titled aristocrats, and other dignitaries who had come to pay their respects.

Kate Middleton, now arguably William’s closest friend if not yet his lover, could only watch the funeral service on the television in her common room at St. Andrews. Camilla was another matter. At first it was believed Charles’s mistress, whom the Queen Mother detested, would not be invited to the funeral. But Charles lobbied his mother through their respective private secretaries, Stephen Lamport and Robin Janvrin, and the Queen grudgingly agreed. Sitting at a discreet distance from the Windsors, Camilla watched as the world formally bade farewell to the one person who for years had stood in the way of her marriage to Charles.

Throughout the service, the eyes of the Royal Family were
trained on the casket, draped with the Queen Mother’s personal blue, red, white, and gold standard. Resting atop the standard was the Queen Mother’s coronation crown. For all the pomp and circumstance, nothing was more moving in its heartfelt sentiment than the hand-lettered card affixed to a wreath of white camellias atop the coffin. It read, simply:

IN LOVING MEMORY—LILIBET

She was marginalized for so long that she believes she has every right to be Queen.

—JAMES WHITAKER

Of course. What else?

—CAMILLA, WHEN ASKED IF CHARLES GOT DOWN ON ONE KNEE TO PROPOSE

Thank you for taking on the task of being married to me.

—CHARLES TO CAMILLA ON THEIR WEDDING DAY

BUCKINGHAM PALACE

JANUARY 2005

The royal jeweler opened the red velvet box, and the Queen peered eagerly inside. He pointed to the Plasticine bag containing a small chunk of twenty-one-carat gold. This was all that remained of the Welsh nugget that had been used to make the rings of royal brides starting with the Queen Mother’s ring in 1923—Elizabeth’s in 1947, Princess Margaret’s in 1960, Princess Anne’s in 1973, and Diana’s in 1981. This was the nugget, taken from the Clogau St. David’s mine at Bontddu in North Wales, that Her Majesty reserved only for those she deemed worthy: members of her immediate family, or—as was the case of Elizabeth and Diana, Princess of Wales—future queens. She put on her reading glasses and took a closer look. “Oh, dear,” sighed the Queen as she shook her head. “There is very little of it left.”

With a white-gloved hand, the royal jeweler then pointed to another bag containing a larger nugget, this one made from gold taken from the River Mawdach as well as St. David’s mine. Gold from this nugget was used in 1986 to make the wedding ring for the problematic and much-resented Sarah, Duchess of York. It seemed only fitting to the Queen that this bit of Welsh gold, and not the nugget that held such significance for the Windsors, be used for Camilla’s wedding ring. “This,” she told the royal jeweler, “will do.”

Over the past few years, the Queen had come to regard as inevitable the marriage of her eldest son to his longtime mistress. Elizabeth had kept her promise to the Queen Mother not to permit it, but there had been mounting pressure from Charles and his St. James’s team to make the Prince’s relationship with Camilla official.

Camilla had certainly not been shy about staking her claim on royal territory—whether she was officially a Windsor or not. Even before the Queen Mother’s death, Camilla had her eye on redecorating Clarence House, home to the “Old Queen” for nearly a half-century.

Immediately after the Queen Mother’s death, Clarence House, the epitome of “English Shabby” with its frayed drapes and threadbare furnishings—and, on the brighter side, a staff of ninety—became the official residence of Charles, William, and Harry. But the person who would have the greatest impact on the four-story, 172-year-old royal palace was not royal at all.

Camilla, who had hired British interior designer Robert Kime to spruce up Ray Mill House and Highgrove, now assigned Kime the unenviable task of redoing Clarence House without entirely eradicating the memory of Charles’s adored Granny. Toward that
end the public spaces on the main floor—the imposing Main Hall, the book-lined Lancaster Room, the Horse Corridor lined with the Queen Mother’s favorite equestrian paintings, the Garden Room—remained essentially the same in spirit.

The upper floors—Charles’s and Camilla’s adjoining suites on the second floor, the young princes’ rooms on the floor above, and a separate suite for Camilla’s father, Major Bruce Shand—were another matter entirely. By the time she was finished, Camilla had racked up a bill of $10 million.

Not surprisingly, there was an uproar over spending
any
money on rooms for the Prince of Wales’s mistress—particularly since a special committee in the House of Commons determined that Charles spent $500,000 in taxpayer funds on Camilla every year. In the end, Charles reluctantly agreed to pony up a whopping $2 million to pay for the cost of redoing Camilla’s room and that of her father.

By late 2004, Elizabeth’s own advisors were warning her that Charles would proceed on his own with plans to marry Mrs. PB, thereby exposing his rift with the Queen and embarrassing the family. They also argued that the British people needed time to get used to the idea of Charles and Camilla as King and Consort.

Her Majesty dug in her heels. On November 6, the Queen and Prince Philip, along with William and Harry, attended the wedding of Lady Tamara Grosvenor and Charles’s godson Edward van Cutsem. But Camilla and Charles, who been instructed to arrive in separate cars and sit in separate pews, boycotted the ceremony.

It was, in fact, Camilla—not Charles—who was throwing down the gauntlet. Pressured by his mistress, Charles now made it abundantly clear to his mother and the Men in Gray that he was going
to go ahead and announce the couple’s engagement—whether Her Majesty approved or not. “And whatever Mrs. Parker Bowles wants,” Richard Kay remarked, “Mrs. Parker Bowles gets.”

The Queen grudgingly gave her long-withheld consent during the Royal Family’s Christmas holiday at Sandringham—with the proviso that Charles stick to his oft-stated promise not to make Camilla his queen after he inherited the crown. Charles’s new wife had no interest in being Princess of Wales now or Queen later, Charles insisted. Both he and Camilla felt it appropriate that, once he became King, she would become Princess Consort. The Men in Gray, resistant to the idea of giving Camilla any title at all, suggested she simply be called “Camilla Windsor.”

After going a step further and getting his sons’ blessing, Charles got down on one knee at Highgrove shortly after New Year’s 2005 and proposed. The couple hosted a reception at Windsor to announce the engagement and show off the ring—an emerald-cut diamond with three diamond baguettes on either side, all weighing a total of eight carats. Ironically, the ring had been left to Charles by the Queen Mother.

Wearing a scarlet dress and a Cheshire-cat grin, Camilla held up her engagement ring for the cameras. “I’m just coming down to earth,” she said, giddily.

The official announcement from Buckingham Palace was, in a word, terse: “The Duke of Edinburgh and I are very happy that the Prince of Wales and Mrs. Parker Bowles are to marry. We have given them our warmest good wishes for their future together.”

Good wishes aside, Crown lawyers were now insisting that Camilla sign a prenuptial agreement. Since Diana had never signed one, Charles had to reach deep into his pocket to pay her the agreed-upon $22.5 million divorce settlement. The Prince of
Wales was forced to “liquidate everything so he could give her cash,” said lawyer Geoffrey Bignell, who oversaw the Prince’s finances at the time. “Princess Diana took every penny he had.”

Since Diana hadn’t been required to sign a prenup, Charles could not bring himself to even broach the issue with Camilla. Quite the contrary, to protect her financial interests in the event something happened to him before the marriage, he established a generous $20 million trust fund that provided her with a guaranteed annual income of $700,000. The money, however, could not be passed on to her family; in the event of Camilla’s death, the $20 million reverted to the royal estate—and, presumably, passed along to William and Harry.

However reticent the Queen may have been to give royal consent to her son’s remarriage, it was a welcome change from having to deal with Harry’s latest headline-making gaffe. This time, the hapless Prince attended a costume party wearing the khaki uniform of desert tank commander Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps, complete with a swastika arm band.

The next day’s
Sun
ran a full-page shot of Harry whooping it up in costume with the headline
HARRY THE NAZI
, igniting a firestorm of protest from members of Parliament, World War II veterans, the Israeli foreign minister, and the families of Holocaust survivors. Lord Levy, Britain’s special envoy to the Middle East, called Harry “clueless about the reality of what happened in the Holocaust” and branded his behavior “appalling.” By wearing a swastika, Lord Levy continued, the young prince had “sent shock waves through the international community.”

Mortified that he had once again brought shame to the Royal Family, Harry, who was about to enter Britain’s elite Sandhurst military academy, conceded his ignorance: The third in line to
the throne had no idea what the swastika signified, or why it might be deemed monumentally offensive. Branding Harry “a complete thicko,” and a “stupid young man who meant no harm,” British commentator Tom Utley went on to ask, “What the hell did they teach him during his five years at Eton?”

Charles was, in the words of one friend, “apoplectic” about what Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center denounced as Harry’s “shameful act.” Clarence House immediately issued an apology on Prince Harry’s behalf. That was not sufficient for Conservative Party leader Michael Howard, who joined the growing chorus demanding that Prince Harry appear on television to deliver a personal apology. Prince Harry, Howard said, should “tell us himself just how contrite he is.” Charles, convinced that his younger son was now being unfairly pilloried for an innocent if spectacularly stupid mistake, refused. Camilla agreed. “The poor boy,” she said, “has been through quite enough. He made a mistake, he’s said he’s sorry. What is all the fuss about?”

Throughout Harry’s Nazi ordeal, Buckingham Palace remained curiously silent. Of all senior Royals, the Queen was perhaps least judgmental. “He’s young,” she told Charles. “He didn’t live through it like I did.” The Queen would have her own explaining to do a full decade later, when photographs surfaced showing Elizabeth doing a Nazi salute as a young girl six years before the start of World War II. Joining in, enthusiastically, are the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret. At the time, the Queen’s Nazi-sympathizing uncle Edward VIII, who would eventually give up the throne to marry Wallis Simpson, was actually at Balmoral teaching the entire Royal Family the proper way to Sieg Heil. “Both Queen Elizabeths, mother and daughter, have commanded
such affection and respect for so long,” observed British writer Max Hastings, “it is painful to see their images tarnished.”

AS SERIOUS AS THE SCANDAL
surrounding Harry’s Nazi costume had been, it paled in comparison to the events that were rapidly unfolding in the House of Windsor. Now that she had publicly welcomed the woman she once repeatedly called “wicked” into the Royal Family, Elizabeth had no choice but to believe that Charles would keep his word not to make Camilla his queen. It certainly didn’t help matters when, at a Highgrove party just before the impending nuptials, Charles insisted on calling Camilla “my queen.”

“Yes, well,” Camilla responded in her deep, Tallulah Bankhead chain smoker’s voice, “let’s not get carried away.” She also claimed to be nonplussed by all the fuss in the press. “It’s just,” she cracked, “two old people getting hitched.”

Two old people who, even after being given a green light by the Queen, remained the object of considerable public scorn. It was all taking a toll on Charles, who complained bitterly about being “tortured” over his relationship with Camilla. “I thought the British people were supposed to be compassionate—I don’t see much of it. . . . All of my life, people have been telling me what to do. I’m tired of it.”