Game of Crowns: Elizabeth, Camilla, Kate, and the Throne by Christopher Andersen
Authors: Christopher Andersen
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she was a teenager.
Elizabeth puts her papers down and walks to the window. To Major Rodgers’s undisguised delight, both she and Philip are smiling down at him. Unfortunately, the Queen’s Piper cannot hear her gamely humming along, trying to keep up with his wheezing bagpipes.
Oklahoma! opened on the West End in 1947, and she and Philip saw it when they were dating. According to Elizabeth’s governess and friend Marion Crawford (who, like the Queen Mother, never stopped calling her young charge “Lilibet”), “People Will Say We’re in Love” was Elizabeth and Philip’s song. “After he started taking her out,” Crawford remembered, “Lilibet would often ask the band at restaurants where they dined to play ‘People Will Say We’re in Love’ for her.” Elizabeth and Philip fell in love while slow dancing to the tune, and were married that November. At the time, long before Charles and Diana and William and Kate, theirs was the Wedding of the Century.
For a few blissfully free moments, Elizabeth is lost in her memories. Such moments of queenly reverie are rare; Her Majesty’s hectic schedule aside, she has never been one for introspection. But since the death of the Queen Mother, friends and royal household staff alike have noticed what her cousin MargaretRhodes called “a change in the Queen’s mood . . . a kind of serenity. I think in a funny way, perhaps, the death of the Queen Mother had quite a huge effect on the Queen . . . in a way that she could come into her own as the head of the family and as the senior royal lady.”
If the Queen felt more than a little intimidated by her mother, Elizabeth was always—to borrow Diana’s nickname for her mother-in-law—“Top Lady” in everyone else’s eyes. Now, as the world celebrates her ninetieth birthday, she knows precious time is running out. The Queen may not share Camilla’s night terrors about what lies ahead for the monarchy once she is gone, or Kate’s deceptively guileless sense of youthful optimism—in short, the firm if unstated belief that William will prevail, and sooner rather than later. But the Queen is keenly aware that to preserve the institution that she has embodied longer than anyone, hard choices must be made—and that royal egos will be badly bruised in the process.
The Queen’s Piper ends with a flourish, then marches off. Her Majesty claps in appreciation, then turns from the window and heads back down the hall. As she walks toward her bedroom, she beckons to her “moving carpet” of corgis and dorgis to come along. Willow, Holly, Vulcan, and Candy all swarm at their mistress’s feet, yapping happily.
It is time to get dressed for the Trooping the Colour parade, and for all the celebrations that will follow. Perhaps more than at any time in her life, she knows who she is, what she represents, the power she still has to stir the world’s imagination, and what she must do with that power. She also knows that, after spending more time on the world stage than anyone in history, male orfemale, she has achieved an almost mythic status that transcends mere fame.
Milestone events like this official birthday, overflowing with pageantry and pomp, are an important part of the royal equation. “I must be seen,” Elizabeth has always been fond of saying, “to be believed.”
----
Let us not take ourselves too seriously. None of us has a monopoly on wisdom.
—THE QUEEN
----
2
----
“IT WILL BE THE MOST APPALLING SHOCK”
HIGH IN A FIG TREE IN KENYA
FEBRUARY 6, 1952
Clad in safari jacket and jeans, binoculars firmly in hand, she climbed to the observation platform shortly before dawn and waited for the rhinos to come. This was Princess Elizabeth’s long-delayed honeymoon trip to Africa, and while her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, preferred to sleep in, she was not about to miss the sight of wild game gathering at the watering hole to drink some fifty feet below. In the meantime, she and Philip’s private
Elizabeth puts her papers down and walks to the window. To Major Rodgers’s undisguised delight, both she and Philip are smiling down at him. Unfortunately, the Queen’s Piper cannot hear her gamely humming along, trying to keep up with his wheezing bagpipes.
Oklahoma! opened on the West End in 1947, and she and Philip saw it when they were dating. According to Elizabeth’s governess and friend Marion Crawford (who, like the Queen Mother, never stopped calling her young charge “Lilibet”), “People Will Say We’re in Love” was Elizabeth and Philip’s song. “After he started taking her out,” Crawford remembered, “Lilibet would often ask the band at restaurants where they dined to play ‘People Will Say We’re in Love’ for her.” Elizabeth and Philip fell in love while slow dancing to the tune, and were married that November. At the time, long before Charles and Diana and William and Kate, theirs was the Wedding of the Century.
For a few blissfully free moments, Elizabeth is lost in her memories. Such moments of queenly reverie are rare; Her Majesty’s hectic schedule aside, she has never been one for introspection. But since the death of the Queen Mother, friends and royal household staff alike have noticed what her cousin MargaretRhodes called “a change in the Queen’s mood . . . a kind of serenity. I think in a funny way, perhaps, the death of the Queen Mother had quite a huge effect on the Queen . . . in a way that she could come into her own as the head of the family and as the senior royal lady.”
If the Queen felt more than a little intimidated by her mother, Elizabeth was always—to borrow Diana’s nickname for her mother-in-law—“Top Lady” in everyone else’s eyes. Now, as the world celebrates her ninetieth birthday, she knows precious time is running out. The Queen may not share Camilla’s night terrors about what lies ahead for the monarchy once she is gone, or Kate’s deceptively guileless sense of youthful optimism—in short, the firm if unstated belief that William will prevail, and sooner rather than later. But the Queen is keenly aware that to preserve the institution that she has embodied longer than anyone, hard choices must be made—and that royal egos will be badly bruised in the process.
The Queen’s Piper ends with a flourish, then marches off. Her Majesty claps in appreciation, then turns from the window and heads back down the hall. As she walks toward her bedroom, she beckons to her “moving carpet” of corgis and dorgis to come along. Willow, Holly, Vulcan, and Candy all swarm at their mistress’s feet, yapping happily.
It is time to get dressed for the Trooping the Colour parade, and for all the celebrations that will follow. Perhaps more than at any time in her life, she knows who she is, what she represents, the power she still has to stir the world’s imagination, and what she must do with that power. She also knows that, after spending more time on the world stage than anyone in history, male orfemale, she has achieved an almost mythic status that transcends mere fame.
Milestone events like this official birthday, overflowing with pageantry and pomp, are an important part of the royal equation. “I must be seen,” Elizabeth has always been fond of saying, “to be believed.”
----
Let us not take ourselves too seriously. None of us has a monopoly on wisdom.
—THE QUEEN
----
2
----
“IT WILL BE THE MOST APPALLING SHOCK”
HIGH IN A FIG TREE IN KENYA
FEBRUARY 6, 1952
Clad in safari jacket and jeans, binoculars firmly in hand, she climbed to the observation platform shortly before dawn and waited for the rhinos to come. This was Princess Elizabeth’s long-delayed honeymoon trip to Africa, and while her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, preferred to sleep in, she was not about to miss the sight of wild game gathering at the watering hole to drink some fifty feet below. In the meantime, she and Philip’s private
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