The Collateral Damage of Queen Elizabeth’s Glorious Reign

 

The Collateral Damage of Queen Elizabeth’s Glorious Reign

In Tina Brown’s “The Palace Papers,” other royals stand and wait, but what purpose do they serve?

By Sam Knight The New Yorker

The Queen is the only royal who actually matters or does anything. That’s not fair, of course, but the monarchy is unfairness personified and glorified, long to reign over us. Naturally, the rest of the Royal Family—the heirs; the spares; Princess Michael of Kent, whose father was in the S.S. and whom Diana nicknamed the Führer; Princess Anne, Charles’s younger sister, who’s known to feed the chickens in a ballgown and Wellington boots after a night at the palace—are all busy. They have numberless engagements and causes, which fill their identical, repeating years, but they exist only as heralds for the magical authority of the Crown, which resides in the Queen and nobody else. “They are high-born scaffolding,” as Tina Brown, a former editor of The New Yorker, writes in “The Palace Papers,” her latest chronicle of the unhappy House of Windsor. The Queen decides. She elevates. She exiles. The rest of them sweat: about their annual allowance; their ridiculously discounted rents on apartments in Kensington Palace; the granting of a weekend cottage on the grounds of Sandringham; their access to the balcony of Buckingham Palace for big photo ops; their entry to the Knights of the Garter, a reward for not fucking things up too badly; their Instagram followers; today’s ghastliness in the MailOnline.

It’s an unspeakable existence: brain-melting privilege with the agency of a root vegetable. In the summer of 1997, a few weeks before Princess Diana died, the Labour politician Peter Mandelson went to see Prince Charles and his lover, Camilla Parker Bowles, at Highgrove, Charles’s eighteenth-century mansion in Gloucestershire. Charles showed Mandelson around his beloved garden in a light rain and complained about his portrayal in the media, Brown reports. Mandelson advised the prince to cheer up. But he recorded his sympathy in his memoir: “For Charles and the Queen, their lives were quite literally their job. Every move they made, every smile or raised eyebrow, every relationship made or severed, was seen as part of their defining function: simply to be the royal family.” Simply to be. Who could stand it?

The Queen, who turned ninety-six last week and will celebrate seventy years on the throne this summer, has stood it very well. She has been an exemplary monarch. But, then, she has always had something to do. Elizabeth was too young, too hidebound, to develop any passion projects before the death of her father, George VI, in February, 1952. Her formative experiences as an adult were a couple of short, happy years as a naval wife in Malta and a few months in the Auxiliary Territorial Service—the women’s branch of the British Army—during the Second World War, when she learned to fix a car.

On her accession, at the age of twenty-five, she became the studious, careful ruler that we know. There have been times when the Queen has momentarily missed the mood, but in the course of a lifetime she has deployed the charisma of the Crown with skill and, occasionally, to great triumph. The Commonwealth, a fifty-four-nation political association of (mostly) former British colonies, is her legacy. Her visit to Ireland in 2011, the first by a British monarch since the country gained its independence, in 1921, was a huge deal. She knows the right word, the correct unreadable facial expression to wear. During the pandemic, the Queen channelled Dame Vera Lynn and Britain’s wartime tribulations, which have anchored her own decades of service: “We will be with our friends again; we will be with our families again; we will meet again.” She understands her majesty. “I have to be seen to be believed” is her signal aphorism.

The portrait of Elizabeth II that emerges from Brown’s book is of someone acutely aware of her multiple roles: as the ceremonial head of state, an empty mirror for the nation to gaze upon itself; as the C.E.O. of a rich, dysfunctional celebrity dynasty (the Queen’s net worth, in 2021, was three hundred and sixty-five million pounds, or a little more than four hundred and fifty million dollars); as a mother, grandmother, and so on. She does not get these confused. To avoid conflict, and to pull rank, the Queen withdraws with her red box of official government papers. According to Brown, the family slang for this maneuver is “ostriching”—just listen to the passive-aggressive envy. The Queen’s favorite subject, bar none, is the breeding of horses. Her closest male friend was the Seventh Earl of Carnarvon—known as Porchey, from an earlier aristocratic title—who served as her racing manager from 1969 until he died of a heart attack while watching the coverage of 9/11. Her wedding present to Charles, when he finally married Camilla, in 2005, was a broodmare. As it happened, the timing of the wedding clashed with the Grand National, Britain’s biggest steeplechase. The organizers delayed the race by twenty-five minutes. Shortly after the ceremony, the Queen stepped into a side room in Windsor Castle, with Andrew Parker Bowles, Camilla’s previous husband, to watch the race. (“One of those inbred social details that baffle royal outsiders,” Brown writes.) During the reception, the Queen slipped out and watched the race again.

What carnage it has been for the rest of them. “The stultifying sameness of it all,” Brown writes. The problem of bored, disaffected royal highnesses—stretching over generations—has never been as bad as it is now. Until Elizabeth was ten, she was the daughter of a spare herself. Prince Albert, who became George VI on the abdication of his brother, Edward VIII, in 1936, had prepared himself for a sedate life of high-born pleasures: hunting, shooting, flying the odd airplane. He married an intelligent non-royal, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, and learned a lot about rhododendrons. But it was easier to be a prince back then. There was more deference, more royal blood to marry into, more feckless aristocrats. Prince George, the Queen’s uncle, was a cocaine addict in the twenties. It happened.

But waiting is torture. “Nobody knows what utter hell it is to be the Prince of Wales,” Charles is reported to have said, and that was almost twenty years ago. The only heir apparent to have been apparent for anything like as long as Charles was Edward VII, the eldest son of Queen Victoria, known as Bertie. He was fifty-nine when his mother finally died, in 1901. (Charles is seventy-three.) “I don’t mind praying to the eternal father,” Bertie said, during Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations. “But I do mind being the only man in the country afflicted with an eternal mother.” Like Charles, Bertie was oppressed by a miserable education and his mother’s low opinion. He liked the finer things in life and had temper tantrums. In his later years, he sought the comfort of Alice Keppel, a young socialite and the future great-grandmother of Camilla Parker Bowles. Keppel’s portrait hung for many years in Camilla’s house in Wiltshire, from which she would quietly drive over to Highgrove to spend the night with the Prince of Wales. According to Brown, one of Charles’s hobbies is buying up pieces of Keppel’s jewelry collection and giving them to his future queen.

Brown relishes these echoes. “The fascination of monarchy,” she writes, “is that its themes—and its problems—repeat themselves over time through its reliably fallible and all-too-mortal protagonists.” But the real subject of “The Palace Papers” is royal purposelessness: how it has been endured by everybody in the Firm except the boss—and the psychological toll that it has taken. The first victim—the first casualty from Us Four, as George VI called his bonny nuclear family—was the Queen’s sister, Princess Margaret. “Bewitching and oh so bored,” in Brown’s description, Margaret was deprived by Her Majesty of the chance to marry a divorced, older man. Over her many subsequent, meandering years, the princess spiralled into being older and divorced herself, as well as a little drunk. “Specialness of position unmoored to any tangible purpose meant that nothing was more exotic to Margaret than the mundane,” Brown writes. “It was one of her lifelong dreams to ride on a bus.” Margaret’s final decline began in 1999, when she badly scalded her feet while running a bath on the private island of Mustique.

Next on the block were the Queen’s four children—the youngest of whom, Prince Edward, the Earl of Wessex, is fifty-eight years old. Sweet and underpowered, Edward’s claim to fame is running a TV-production company that managed to upend the palace’s plan to protect Prince William’s privacy at university by turning up at St. Andrew’s with a camera crew. The leader of the royal boomers is Charles. The Queen missed his second and third Christmases and his third birthday. His earliest memory is of lying in a vast, high-sided pram. “He’s not a terribly strong person,” Mark Bolland, the prince’s former communications adviser, told the Guardian, in 2003. Brown deftly conjures the loose, aristo playground in which Charles (sort of) frolicked in the seventies: polo parties, floral sofas, and a certain amount of shagging other people’s wives. At a summer ball in 1980, Charles and Camilla made out on the dance floor in view of her husband, a prodigious adulterer himself. “HRH is very fond of my wife,” Parker Bowles remarked, suavely. “And she appears to be very fond of him.”

When staying as a house guest, Charles likes to bring his orthopedic bed, a few paintings to make him feel at home, a teddy bear, and his martini, pre-mixed and served in his own glass. “The sorry truth was that Charles, in his material character, just wasn’t the kind of person the Queen admired,” Brown writes. His sister, Anne, seems the most contented of the lot. Takes after her father, apparently. No nonsense. Goes where she is told. The most heinous and depraved is Prince Andrew, the Queen’s second son, said to be her favorite as a child. Between 2019 and earlier this year, the Duke of York was stripped of his royal responsibilities and military titles because of his long association with Jeffrey Epstein, the financier and pedophile. In February, the Queen reportedly gave her son funds to settle a lawsuit with Virginia Giuffre, who had accused Andrew of sexually abusing her when she was trafficked as a minor. Brown suggests that Prince Andrew shows symptoms of a purported psychological phenomenon known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, “the cognitive bias in which people come to believe that they are smarter and more capable than they really are.” He could just be an asshole. In 2015, Brown reports, an American visitor to Royal Lodge—the discreet pile that Andrew shares with his ex-wife, the Duchess of York, near Windsor Castle—was having lunch with the duchess when the prince walked in. “What are you doing with this fat cow?” he asked the visitor.

“They are like creatures in a Middle Eastern harem, captives of luxury everyone resents, but without the wherewithal or expertise to pursue successful lives beyond,” Brown observes. The Firm’s leading millennials, William and Harry, are the offspring of its most painful and operatic marriage, between Charles and Diana. Brown untangles how the two princes, both traumatized by the death of their mother, have attempted to cope by building adult lives almost diametrically opposed to each other. William and Catherine, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, have gone for full domestic quietude: shopping for their own groceries, sharing their weekends with other reliably discreet, titled types in Norfolk, wearing affordable clothes. With their three winsome children—George, Charlotte, and Louis—and the throne distantly in view, they are “Us Five.” (A rumor that William was sleeping around among their Norfolk set was apparently spread by members of his parents’ generation, who couldn’t believe how staid it all was.)

Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, went the other way. In Brown’s telling, Harry fell in love with Meghan Markle very fast, amazed by her dynamism and poise, and then watched, in fury and wonder, as she was brought low by the same forces that made him sweat before he even left the house. “At the core of the difficulties was determining whether the Sussexes were celebrity royals or royal celebrities,” Brown writes. “Two very different states of being.” The Sussexes are planet-level influencers—their causes are legion—but their glamour derives, as water flows to the sea, from Harry’s nonagenarian grandmother, something that, between them, they failed to apprehend. Harry “is a deeply caring person who wants to make a positive difference,” a palace source told Brown. “He doesn’t understand that the reason he’s getting to do that is because he’s a Prince.”

It was the Queen, in C.E.O. mode, who freed them from the royal cage. Now they are comfortably adrift in Montecito, California, a reported more than a hundred million dollars richer—courtesy of Netflix, Spotify, and Penguin Random House—and doomed to trade, forever, on the damage done to them by an ancient Crown. (Harry is currently involved in a court case against the British government over the cost of his security arrangements when visiting the U.K.: he wants to be able to pay for police protection; the Home Office says that the police aren’t available for hire.) “I never thought I would have my security removed, because I was born into this position,” the prince told Oprah last year. “I inherited the risk, so that was a shock to me.” He inherited much more than that.

Unaccountably, there are characters who have managed to survive—even prosper, albeit briefly—in the purgatory of this Elizabethan age. By coincidence or not, the two people who come out best from “The Palace Papers” are Charles’s wives: Camilla and her tragic predecessor. Camilla just seems to have had the right constitution for it all: raised in a happy family, tough as teak and made convivial by generations, eons perhaps, of well-bred English socializing. Tennis. Riding out. A glass of sherry after church. “I’ve never been able not to talk,” she told Geordie Greig, the former editor of the Daily Mail, in 2017. “It’s in the psyche, not to leave a silence.” Camilla is, in Brown’s memorable phrase, “marvelously salty fun.”

You wouldn’t say the same of Diana, who flickers in the background of “The Palace Papers” like a candle about to set fire to a curtain. She came from a fancy family, the Spencers, even more fractious than the Windsors. Her mother, Frances, lost custody of her four children after she left Diana’s father, Viscount Althorp, in 1968, and was deemed a “bolter” by her own mother. (It was never explained to the kids why she was leaving, according to Brown.) Diana suffered grievously as a princess, but she also, by instinct and upbringing, had a sophisticated feel for the dynamics of royal power: whose charisma was whose. “I was a different person,” she told Martin Bashir, in her now infamous BBC interview, in 1995, recalling her overseas tour with Charles to Australia and New Zealand, twelve years earlier. “I realized the sense of duty, the level of intensity of interest, and the demanding role I now found myself in.” A poignant episode in Brown’s book is her recollection of a lunch in New York with Diana and Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, six weeks before the princess’s death. “I was bowled over by the confident, skilful way she wooed us,” Brown writes. Divorced and in exile, Diana planned to make a film every two years, to highlight social problems that were important to her. She was going to start with illiteracy. “Diana was always ahead of the curve,” Brown writes. “Her plan sounds very like what Meghan and Harry are attempting with their entertainment deals today, but with one central difference: It was better thought out.”

The succession looms. The Queen was born more than thirty years closer to the assassination of President Lincoln than she was to the present day. “How will anyone know how to be British anymore?” Brown asks of the dreadful moment, when it comes. Her Majesty has been streamlining her team for the transition, tying up loose ends. In 2019, palace Kremlinologists noticed that a family portrait of the Sussexes was absent from its place near the royal elbow during the broadcast of the Queen’s Christmas message. Earlier this year, after the defenestration of Andrew, she announced that she would like Camilla to become Queen Consort, rather than stay a simple duchess, when Charles takes over.

Brown makes the point that at least Charles’s deepest political concern—the state of nature in the face of climate change—is in synch with the present moment. At last year’s U.N. climate-change summit in Glasgow, the almost-king, who drives an Aston Martin converted to run on whey and the by-products of English wine, repeated his call for “a circular bioeconomy” to save us all. The reality is that Charles’s relatively short reign is likely to be busy with the last fourteen countries outside the U.K. where the British monarch is the head of state rushing for the door. Last week, on a visit to the Caribbean, Prince Edward was greeted by protesters and demands for reparations for Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade. The long-term survival—and sanity—of the House of Windsor now rests in the happy, close-knit, middlebrow care of William and Catherine, and their clutch of little Cambridges. What could possibly go wrong?