Elizabeth the Queen (75 page)

Fergie continued to maintain a profligate lifestyle, however, employing eleven full- and part-time staff, compared to Andrew’s five. Her finances began to implode again in 2009 as her income declined and her debts grew to more than £2 million. In the spring of 2010 the fifty-year-old duchess was in a desperate mood when Mazher Mahmood, the
News of the World
reporter who had entrapped Sophie Wessex nine years earlier, enticed Sarah into a sting by posing as an Indian businessman. With hidden cameras recording the meeting in a Mayfair apartment, Fergie sold access to her former husband in exchange for £500,000, including a $40,000 cash down payment that she carried off in a computer bag. She repeatedly emphasized that Andrew “never does accept a penny for anything” and said she only wanted “a lick of the spoon.”

In an effort to defuse the potential damage from the incriminating footage, which was an instant sensation on YouTube, Fergie quickly issued a statement saying she was “sincerely sorry.” She explained that her finances were “under stress,” but said this was “no excuse for a serious lapse of judgment.” Both she and Andrew said that he had been unaware of her contacts with the phony businessman. After consulting with the Queen, Andrew covered a portion of his ex-wife’s debts and helped her restructure the rest. That July Fergie fired all her employees and agreed to operate under the supervision of Andrew’s office.

The following month, the Queen and Philip gathered their children and most of their grandchildren (William and Harry were off on military duty) for a nostalgic ten-day Western Isles cruise aboard the
Hebridean Princess
to celebrate the sixtieth and fiftieth birthdays of Anne and Andrew. The guest of honor was eighty-three-year-old retired nanny Mabel Anderson, who lived rent-free in one of the Queen’s grace-and-favor houses in Windsor Great Park and remained close to her former charges, particularly Charles.

For the first time since the royal yacht was decommissioned in 1997, the family re-created
Britannia
Day by stopping at the Castle of Mey, where Charles customarily stayed in his grandmother’s faithfully preserved pale blue bedroom for a week at the beginning of August. On August 2, 2010, Charles assumed the role of his late grandmother and hosted the family for a tour of the castle, proudly showing off various improvements he had overseen—the new visitor center as well as the recently built turret in the southeast corner of the walled garden. The Queen queried the staff about visitor numbers, inquired about the new radiant heating on the ground floor of the castle, and climbed up the turret to look out at the Orkney Islands through a monocular. After their tour, the royal party sat down to the traditional lunch, which featured
oeufs Drumkilbo
, just the way the Queen Mother had served them.

I
N HIS SEVENTH
decade, Prince Charles had not only found contentment in his new life with Camilla, but fulfillment in the job he had invented to give meaning to his role as heir to the throne. The Prince of Wales doggedly promoted a wide-ranging agenda embracing architecture, historic preservation, the environment, sustainable farming, rain forest conservation, health, education, and job training. A number of his views, such as the value of organic produce and the need for human-scale architecture to build new communities, were initially derided but later moved into the mainstream. He raised more than £110 million each year for his personal charities, which have extended his reach to projects in China, Afghanistan, Guyana, and Jamaica.

He had grown more comfortable in his own skin and committed himself to establishing his legacy through the job that, as he frequently said, “I made up as I went along.” “He has made a full life for himself,” said Nancy Reagan. “He does so much more than any previous Prince of Wales.” Yet his approach to his role is diametrically opposed to his mother’s more deliberate operation at Buckingham Palace. Much of what the Queen does she is advised to do, while her firstborn son tends to do mainly what he wants to. Charles “is high octane because he is so driven,” said one of his aides. “He is always at full tilt.”

The differences in temperament between mother and son are striking. “He is probably an instinctively glass half empty person, while she is more a half full one,” said her cousin Margaret Rhodes. The Queen “has no illusions about what can and can’t be changed,” said her former press secretary Charles Anson. “She has an acceptance of the way life deals its cards that is rare in the Western world, and stems partly from her religious conviction and partly from her life experience.” Prince Charles is more emotional than the Queen, easily offended and short-tempered, with an inclination to brood and to need reassurance. “Camilla soothes things and anticipates what could go wrong,” said Anne Glenconner.

He is more impressionable than his mother, and over the years was influenced by gurus such as Laurens van der Post and the mystical poet Kathleen Raine. But while the Queen can be persuaded by a well-crafted proposal, Charles dislikes advice contrary to his beliefs. There are few, even among his close friends, who feel comfortable challenging him for fear of being judged insensitive or disloyal. His father, by contrast, welcomes robust argument. While Philip can squash an opponent on occasion, he is more than happy to accommodate the views of someone he feels has mastered his brief.

Charles is also less direct than either of his parents, who can be counted on for a straight answer. “You sense he maneuvers,” said a longtime friend of Camilla. “People have to maneuver with him.” Charles enjoys gossip more than the Queen (although she likes political scuttlebutt) and wonders whether “that person is for or against me, in this or that camp,” said one of Elizabeth II’s former advisers. “The Queen doesn’t think that way. It is more, ‘What is the problem? What do we do?’ She only wants to know who is in what camp if it is obstructing a decision that needs to be taken.”

No one would deny that the Queen sets high standards for her household, but Charles is more extravagant. Elizabeth II knows what everything costs and economizes when necessary. Guests at routine Buckingham Palace receptions are served wine, potato chips, and nuts, while at Clarence House they get gourmet hors d’oeuvres, and the dinner parties have elaborate floral displays and theatrical lighting. “It is fair to say when he feels something should be done well, he doesn’t stint,” said Patricia Brabourne. When he goes to stay at Sandringham for a week on his own, Charles brings along vans filled with vegetables and meats from Highgrove, even though there is a farm on the Norfolk estate. At dinner parties, he is known to eat a different meal from his guests, sometimes with his personal cutlery.

Such behavior may seem persnickety and spoiled, but Charles has a capacity for empathy that was underestimated in the Diana era. His ability to engage with people is “as good if not better than the Queen,” said a former courtier. “He has natural warmth with the Queen’s sense of duty and Philip’s ability to make a guy laugh.” He is more imaginative and intuitive as well, and his thoughtfulness is legendary. When Anne Glenconner’s sister got cancer, Charles wrote her a seventeen-page letter with ideas about alternative treatments.

While the Queen has four private secretaries, Charles has eleven—nine full-time and two part-time—plus separate directors for each of the twenty charities he founded and a commercial enterprise that produces his Duchy Originals line of organic products ranging from Sicilian Lemon All Butter Shortbread to Mandarin Zest and Rose Geranium shampoo. All the profits, totaling more than £6 million in two decades, have been donated to charitable causes.

Along with Charles’s independence has come a boldness to proselytize for his causes in speeches, publications, and regular letters to government ministers in his distinctive scrawl. “There is nobody I admire more for his energy, ambition and enthusiasm,” said Sir Malcolm Ross, who served for two years as Charles’s Master of the Household after eighteen years in the senior ranks at Buckingham Palace. “He wants to save the world. The problem is he wants to save the world this afternoon and every other day.” In recent years Charles has urged that the global economic system be overhauled and questioned the values of a materialistic consumer society, denounced climate change skeptics, called for a “revolution” in the Western world’s “mechanistic approach to science,” and praised Islam for its belief that there is “no separation between man and nature.” He has twice taken on one of Britain’s most prestigious architects, Sir Richard Rogers, and derailed his multimillion-dollar projects for being incompatible with their neighborhoods, much to the relief of nearby residents.

His outspokenness has periodically put him at odds with his family, especially his father. After Charles first condemned genetically modified crops in 1998 for jeopardizing the delicate balance of nature, Philip vehemently disagreed on the grounds that such crops are necessary to feed the world. In 2000, when Charles intensified his attack on bioengineered agriculture, both his father and Princess Anne publicly took issue with his position, which his sister witheringly called a “huge oversimplification.” Philip pointed out in an interview with
The Times
that “we have been genetically modifying animals and plants ever since people started selective breeding.”

Tony Blair, whose government supported genetically modified farming, had already complained a year earlier to the Queen about Charles’s public pronouncements and had fumed to Alastair Campbell that the prince was using “the same argument that says if God intended us to fly, he would have given us wings.” The prime minister expressed his concern privately to Charles through cabinet minister Peter Mandelson that his remarks “were becoming unhelpful” because they were “anti-scientific and irresponsible in the light of food shortages in the developing world.”

The Queen has typically remained above the fray and avoided confrontation with the heir apparent. “She has allowed Prince Charles to work at his interests, his aims and his ambitions,” said Malcolm Ross. At the same time, she has found many of his ideas baffling, and has expressed concern to her advisers when he has become embroiled in public controversies. “It is not a cozy relationship, and never has been,” said Margaret Rhodes. “They love each other, but the family is not set up to be cozy.” In recent years tensions between the Queen and her heir have eased, and they regularly meet for a private dinner.

She has gradually called on Charles to share more of her duties, presiding over investitures, receiving dignitaries in audiences, and reading sensitive documents in his own dark green boxes. Palace courtiers anticipate that if Philip dies before the Queen, additional responsibility will shift to Charles, who will become more of a chief executive officer to his mother’s chairman of the board. “That will be a defining moment,” said one of her former advisers. “Prince Philip is such a part of her life and her role.”

Advisers who work with mother and son see contrasts in their approach to the duties a sovereign is expected to carry out. The Queen has investitures down to a science, allocating forty seconds to each of the nearly one hundred encounters during the hour-long ceremony in the Buckingham Palace ballroom. After a quick prompt from her equerry, she leans forward to present the insignia, smoothing the sash or ribbon, as Cecil Beaton once said, like a “hospital nurse or nanny.” Keeping eye contact, she smiles brightly, steps back, asks a question, and listens intently until her inner alarm sounds and she extends her hand to say goodbye. When Charles does the honors, he tends to linger and chat more, which lengthens the proceedings by as much as fifteen minutes.

Elizabeth II is more efficient, systematic, and disciplined than her son in other ways as well. She never falls behind on her official boxes, while he often does when he gets caught up in what one of his aides described as “furiously writing letters, rewriting speeches, and reading documents”—behavior the Queen would consider self-indulgent. (In 2009–10 he personally wrote 1,869 letters.) He avoids reading newspapers, a hangover from the Diana era, preferring to get daily reports from his aides and a digest of current events from
The Week
magazine, which the Queen worries will limit his knowledge, not to mention the perspective on the media she has developed through long experience.

At various times Charles has ruminated to friends and colleagues about the possibility of his mother’s abdication, once drawing a sharp rebuke from her in November 1998 when his press secretary, Mark Bolland, leaked to the media that the Prince of Wales would be “privately delighted” if his mother were to step down from the throne. When confronted by the Queen, Charles apologized and said the story was untrue. The idea of abdicating is anathema to Elizabeth II, who takes seriously her oath and anointment with holy oil during her coronation. When George Carey went to her in 2003 to say he was ready to retire as Archbishop of Canterbury, she sighed and said, “Oh, that’s something I can’t do. I am going to carry on to the end.”

The only caveat, as the Queen said to her cousin Margaret Rhodes, would be “unless I get Alzheimer’s or have a stroke.” “But even then she wouldn’t retire,” said Rhodes. If the Queen were incapacitated, Prince Charles would become Regent, acting on her behalf under the terms of the Regency Act of 1937.

In the royal tradition, the Queen, her husband, and her eldest son have state funeral plans with scripts they have approved. The name of Philip’s “Forth Bridge” plan derives from the bridge over the Firth of Forth in Scotland, Charles’s “Menai Bridge” is named after the span that connects the mainland of Wales and the island of Anglesey, and the Queen’s “London Bridge” is self-explanatory. All three plans are overseen by the Lord Chamberlain’s office and have similar elements stretching over nine days from death to burial, with processions, lying in state, and services mapped out. “The principals don’t tweak the plans,” said Malcolm Ross, who was involved in the preparations. “We report back to reassure them. The last thing they want to do is crawl all over their own funerals. They are more involved with the basics.” At least once a year, senior Palace aides talk through the arrangements and do tabletop exercises.