Her Outfits
Someone or other is always trying to kill her. She sees no point in tracking individual threats; one has people for that. She does not regard the possibility of being murdered as a reason to alter her schedule. It is an inconvenience of life, like long speeches and bad weather. Nineteen eighty-one, for instance: a month before her eldest son’s wedding to Diana Spencer. She was dressed in the ceremonial red tunic of the First Battalion Welsh Guards, riding her favorite horse, the black mare called Burmese, in her annual Birthday Parade. As she rode past the crowd on the Mall, a seventeen-year-old boy named Marcus Serjeant fired six shots at her from a replica Colt Python revolver. The shots were blanks, but in the moment, no one knew that they were. Burmese spooked at the noise and nearly bolted. She leaned forward in the saddle, calm, and soothed the horse while the police went after Serjeant. The boy said later that he would have liked to kill her, but he had been unable to find real bullets. He said that he wanted to be famous, like Mark David Chapman, who had assassinated John Lennon the year before. Once Burmese was settled, she straightened her tunic and continued with the parade.
In 2005, Ayman al-Zawahiri, then the number two leader of al-Qaeda, proclaimed her an enemy of Islam and a target for jihadists. In 2007, Ugandan terrorists posing as a television crew filled two broadcast vans with homemade bombs, intending to blow her up at a Commonwealth summit in Kampala. In 2014, an al-Qaeda-affiliated magazine published an article urging lone-wolf assassins to kill her at the horse races, her love of horses being widely known. In 2015, four men were arrested for plotting to stab her to death at the Royal Albert Hall. As a girl, to keep safe from German bombs, she slept in the dungeons at Windsor. At fourteen, she recorded a radio address to persuade the United States to join the fighting. Her father, the king, held dances throughout the Blitz, leading conga lines through palace staterooms. What is there to do but carry on?
It is right, of course, to take precautions. Sensible precautions, for her, come in the form of mint jackets, pink dresses, yellow hats. She is famous for her wardrobe of bright monochromes: pink tweeds and lime-green woolens, magenta silks, lemon veils. But her ensembles are not matters of style only. Her clothes are an issue of state security. She makes herself a block of vivid color because she is so often in crowds. Her protectors must be able to see her. Predecessors of hers, it is true, wore brilliant devices on their shields, yet were sometimes lost in battle. Still one prefers to believe one might trust one’s guards to look out for the lady in violet.
Her Heir
Prince Charles is now sixty-seven years old. He has the bearing of a man who has fought bitterly, with the tooth and claw of detachment and protocol, to survive the immense good fortune into which he was born. A scholar manqué: heavy but intangible. Proceeding down the sidewalk with his fingertips pointing downward into the pocket of his double-breasted suit jacket, umbrella hung over the opposite forearm. A man with camel coats, bowler hats, a face like a shaved fox: pointed, defeated, amused. Age-mauved cheeks achieved sunlessly, as if, by the same principle through which ice can be scalding, he had burned himself by spending too much time in the rain. There are men who command a room with their presence, men whose vitality bullies the air. Charles compels attention through a mechanism inverse to this, a kind of charismatic absence: Reality warps toward his titles as toward a reluctant black hole. Then he regards reality, with his loose, sad eyes, as if he wishes it would go away again. We are sure, he seems to say, to disappoint each other. A pity: but there it is. No use pretending.
There is speculation that when his mother dies, Charles will allow the succession to bypass him. He cannot possibly wish to be king. He would be the oldest monarch ever crowned in Britain. He could not help but appear, to his subjects, as something pitiable, an enthroned anticlimax. So why not let the job sift down to the younger generation, which looks more suited to it? In fact he does not have a choice. The assumption of kingship is not volitional. Should you be next in line when the reigning monarch passes, sovereignty enters with your next breath. And then, when his mother dies, the only monarch most of her subjects have known in their lifetimes, the grief will be international and paralyzing. It will not be a time for violating tradition, or making personal stands.
What he could do is abdicate. His great-uncle did, Edward VIII, to marry his American divorcée. An act still viewed with shame within the family. Charles is made of different stuff, in this sense: That the faithful performance of duties he dislikes is the measure of strength that authorizes him, in his own estimation, to dislike them. The less he wants the throne, therefore, the less he will be free to give it up. He will have to be king because he will hate it so much.
So: a man for puttering in gardens. A man for planning with great care the slight repositioning of a retaining wall. A man for books of medium age, read in uncomfortable chairs. Not a cruel man, but self-protective, unpracticed in kindness. When his first wife threw herself down the stairs in misery, he went out to play polo: a normal day already the limit of what he could deal with. (He tries to be better for his boys.) A man who loves nothing more than to write an editorial about wool. He has done so, in fact, this very month, for the Telegraph, on its uses and capacities, its neglectedness in the era of synthetics. “The much bigger contribution that wool could, and should, be making in our lives.” This is his Britain: a land of practical craftsmen, pride in workmanship, the preservation of old ways. Shoes lasted in Northamptonshire, tweed woven in the Hebrides, slippers furred by Draper, umbrellas ribbed by Brigg. What if I told you that candles use less energy than lightbulbs; what if I told you that music has not advanced since the motet? Sent into the world this way, to face Brexit and BBC News with the help of a Stuart horticulture manual and a malacca walking stick. To face modernity’s submarines, with his twin rows of suit buttons gleaming like Lord Nelson’s gun ports.
Her Castles
Hawthorn flowers only once each year, but in Glastonbury, where legend says that Joseph of Arimathea brought Christianity to Britain, some hawthorn flowers twice: once in the spring, like the common plant, and once in the winter, at Christmas. The flowers are white and quilled with red-tipped stamens. Their scent is hideous; medieval peasants said that the smell of hawthorn was like the smell of plague. But they are beautiful. Legend has it that Joseph thrust his staff into Wearyall Hill, where it sprouted branches and grew into a holy thorn tree. Legend says many things in Glastonbury. It says that once, when these lands lay under water, the hill now called Glastonbury Tor was called the Isle of Avalon. It says King Arthur is buried there, or the Holy Grail is buried there, or both are buried there. It says that thousands of years ago men made a gigantic map of the stars, a kind of terrestrial zodiac, out of the landscape itself, by lining up hedgerows and trackways: Its remnants, legend says, may still be traced. It says that the Tor is an entrance to another, older world. It says that Glastonbury is a gateway to Annwn, the land of the dead.
Each year at Christmastime, the pupils of St. John’s Infants’ School gather at the Church of St. John the Baptist. They sing carols. The vicar makes a speech. Then the school’s eldest child cuts a flowering sprig from a twice-flowering holy hawthorn tree. The sprig is wrapped and sent to the queen at Buckingham Palace. Each year, the thorn blossoms travel with the royal family to Sandringham, their estate in Norfolk, where they spend Christmas; and each year the sprig sits at the center of the table, among crystal decanters and silver candlesticks, at Her Majesty’s Christmas dinner.
Stability, tradition, the repetition of symbolic gestures, the preservation in politics of an identity with roots sunk in myth: These are advantages monarchy offers over more republican forms of democracy. In the United States, for instance, the election of each new president occasions panic and fury from the losing side, because the question of what the nation is, how the nation is to be imagined, is forever an open one. It is possible to go to sleep in a country in which one believes and wake up in a country one no longer recognizes. To her subje
cts, she offers herself as a check against paroxysm, as a continuity. This symbolism has limited efficacy, perhaps, but it has efficacy, and over a long time its influence is enormous. An empire or an island, in Europe or out, what we are is to be found not in a party or a manifesto but in the cohort of things that last.
At Windsor Castle, her place near London, there is the legend of an oak. Shakespeare, who put on plays at Windsor, wrote about it. It might have started with him, or it may be an older story, one not written down until the time of the other Elizabeth. Versions of the tale vary, but it begins in the forest of Windsor, where there is a tree that men fear to walk by at night. Long ago, a huntsman named Herne died there, hanged from the branches. Now he appears under them, a glowing ghost, with a stag’s antlers sprouting from his head. Or else he comes at the head of a wild hunt, lightning flashing, his horse trailing demon hounds, monstrous owls circling. With faery frenzy they wheel about the sky, and those who see them are cursed, or made to join them, or doomed to die. A midnight storm out of hell: centered on a tree not an hour’s walk from the castle walls wherein ten generations of ladies and lords have lain sleeping.
Not a story to take seriously, perhaps; but it would be a mistake, too, to lose all sense of the ancient magic of Britain. The queen is the land, and there are ways of being with the land that are not ways of London. In London her privy councillors kiss her hand and walk backward out of the room; she receives a sculpture of a Bengal tiger from the high commissioner of Bangladesh; tourists pose outside her windows taking selfies with stuffed sheep. It is a relief to ease into the country. Two maidens fair rode to the wood, and dew was on their gown, sir. At Balmoral, her castle in Scotland, you can hear the floors creak. You can hear the wind. In the evening the lights come on one by one, like children being born. At Balmoral, she pilots her Range Rover and looks at oxen and watches grouse being shot. She ties a kerchief around her head and wears a tartan skirt and goes walking with her corgis in the mist. She leans against rail fences. She asks after the planting. On the snouts of huge horses, she lays an appraising hand.
Her Husband
He makes her laugh. That is what people say about him. Always in a tone of faint apology: Oh, well, he may be an antique, cadaverous, a racist, a snob, a bully to his son, scornful, impatient, brittle, and close-minded, but Her Majesty needs to unwind somehow, doesn’t she? There is, in the business of ruling, a great deal of inevitable false consciousness. To be royal at all is to accept that you are better than everyone else. Myself, our family, this bloodline, chosen by God to stand above the nation. But in a democracy it will never do to say this out loud. So one makes a great clamor about service. One places oneself humbly at the disposal of those over whom one is elevated: I wear these diamonds not for myself but for you. For this sort of twaddle Prince Philip has no patience. Why should he remember the names of the tribes in some tiresome jungle, or worry about the mental health of unwed mothers, when a Rolls-Royce is waiting to take him home to his guns and his claret? His little jokes slash away at false egalitarian cobwebs; they must feel bracing, if you happen to be royal, in the way that the exposure of a hidden but operative logic always does. My dear, these people are beneath us. He makes her laugh: standing behind her, telling it like it is to the world’s smallest audience.
As a boy he loved to swim. After his grandfather’s assassination, his family was forced to flee Greece, and he spent years bouncing from one half-strange relative’s palace to the next. Boarding school in England, boarding school in Germany. Shouts from the cricket field, Hitler salutes in the halls. He celebrated his ninth birthday at Wolfsgarten, a grand Schloß in the German state of Hessen, riding his new bicycle and bouncing a colored ball in the pool. He played there with Christoph of Hesse, the fiancé of his sister Princess Sophie. Christoph: dashing, enthusiastic, obsessed with fast cars and airplanes; he died in 1943, an Oberführer in the SS. Philip’s next-oldest sister, Princess Cecilie, joined the Nazi Party in 1937, along with her husband, Georg Donatus, the hereditary Grand Duke of Hesse. They were killed in a plane crash soon after. Hitler sent condolences; Göring attended the funeral. Philip attended it, too, in Darmstadt, walking behind the coffin through streets draped with swastikas.
What language did you speak at home, Your Highness? Home? At the Cheam School, in Hampshire, the pool was outdoors. The shock of it in cold weather, the roar of it in your ears; slap of hands on water, chilling gulps of air. He won one medal for swimming, another for diving when he was eleven. When his father died Philip inherited his gold ring, his ivory-handled shaving brush, and his debts. His mother, who was Queen Victoria’s great-granddaughter, was diagnosed with schizophrenia and sent to a sanatorium. He went years without hearing from her. During the war she lived in Athens, where she sheltered Jewish refugees. At eighteen, as soon as he could, he joined the Royal Navy and went to war against his own brothers-in-law.
The world is very large. The life of a monarch encompasses many things. After Elizabeth married him he began finding himself in new countries, odd, uncomfortable places, meeting chieftains and suchlike. Damnable odd fellows! Accept this sword, made from a great whale’s tooth. We present you with this bow, this hide, this dish of ants. Remember their names, remember the modes of address. Blessedly the younger generation are now as capable of hying off to God knows where as he was once, in the Stone Age, which takes off some of the strain. Soon his grandson and the Middleton girl will leave for the Yukon Territory—imagine, a royal tour of the Yukon! Snow and ice and not a dram of good scotch in the place. Securing the allegiance of those very important royal subjects, polar bears at the end of the earth!
Well, they’ll have enough to keep them busy. No shortage of ninnies who want to bask a minute in the aura. Never a lack of locals to placate. So often the royal couple’s duty is to make others feel important. Easy enough when your importance has never been in doubt. But he has been homeless in the finest castles in Europe; he has nurtured the small flame of his own prestige through terrible nights. The map he read by it never showed him these decades of vague, agreeable service. It helps, of course, to know he is doing his duty. But duty, around the small grain of his mortification, is a pearl that never quite closes. Give him the playing field, the decks of his old ships: places where he could trust reason and ruthlessness and where—quasi-orphan that he was—he knew whom he needed to impress. Hold your nerve. Prove your worth. Privation, like war and sport, is clarifying. It is only when you get to the top of the pile that they blame you for knowing which way is up.
Her Daughter-in-Law Who Is Dead
When Diana turned eighteen her parents bought her a flat in London, so she moved to London and lived there. She lived with three friends whom she charged eighteen pounds a week. She painted the walls in pastels. She organized the cleaning schedule. She hung a sign on her bedroom door that said CHIEF CHICK. She had recently taken a cooking course where she learned to make chocolate roulades and borscht, and she sometimes made a roulade for her friends, but her favorite foods to eat at home were Harvest Crunch bran cereal and store-bought chocolates. She worried that she was getting plump, but then she always worried about that. She liked practical jokes. She dated schoolboys, or she dated recently graduated Etonians who were now junior officers in the guards, or she dated heirs of minor noble titles who had finished up at Oxford and were spending the year traveling. Sometimes she did their laundry. She drove a Honda Civic at first, then a dark red Austin Mini Metro. She found a job in a kindergarten, but she wanted extra money, so she got work cleaning houses through an employment agency called Solve Your Problems. Within two years she would be married to the heir to the throne of England.
It was her sister who found the flat. Sarah was older, wittier, more charismatic, and already established in London, where she worked for the real-estate agency Savills. Diana had spent her life in Sarah’s shadow. In London, she would go to her sister’s flat and Sarah would say to her friends, oh, that’s only Diana, give her your dishes, she’ll do t
he washing up. Sarah paid her one pound an hour to vacuum, iron, and dust. It was Sarah, too, who first had a romance with Prince Charles. Or a romance of sorts. They met at Ascot and dated for nine months. Sloane Rangers: She called him “sir” for nine months, and he never corrected her.
The apartment in London cost Diana’s parents fifty thousand pounds. Her parents were divorced. They had been married in Westminster Abbey, and the queen had attended the wedding, but the marriage had been bad, and they split up when Diana was small. Both her mother and her father had since remarried. Her father was an earl, the 8th Earl Spencer, and he was now married to the daughter of Dame Barbara Cartland, the bestselling romance novelist. When Dame Barbara came to visit she would bring Diana armloads of her books—she published more than seven hundred—which Diana went through like candy. Diana’s mother was the daughter of a baron, the 4th Baron Fermoy. Now she was married to the heir of a wallpaper fortune. She lived with him on a thousand-acre farm on a remote island off the coast of Scotland. Diana’s father had won custody of the children in a legal battle. He lived with his wife at Althorp, the Spencer family’s ancestral manor in Northamptonshire.
It was at Althorp that she met Charles, during a shooting weekend while the prince was with her sister. She was sixteen then. He brought his Labrador and wore rain boots; her first thought on seeing him was, what a sad man. She felt podgy and undistinguished, but she was lively and he found her charming. After dinner, he asked her to show him the picture gallery. Sarah caught up to them and insisted on showing him the etchings.
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