BEING monarch could be said to be the loneliest job in the world.
For much of her life as Queen, Elizabeth had only three people with whom she could truly confide — her mother, her sister and her husband.
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In 2002, the year of her Golden Jubilee, she lost two of them, when Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother died.
Margaret slipped away in her sleep on February 9, aged 71, her son and daughter at her hospital bedside.
The heavy drinker, who had taken up smoking at 15 and given up in 1991, had suffered a stroke. A private funeral service was held at Windsor six days later, the 50th anniversary of their father’s funeral.
Then, on March 30, the Queen Mother died in her sleep at the Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park, aged 101. Her surviving daughter was at her bedside.
Once again the Queen was in mourning. Her mother’s flag-draped coffin, covered with an arrangement of the Queen Mother’s favourite camellias from her garden, lay in state at Westminster Hall for three days.
More than 200,000 people filed past the coffin, with queues stretching more than a mile. Members of the military, and at one stage her four grandsons — Charles, Andrew, Edward and Margaret’s son David, Viscount Linley, stood vigil at the four corners of the casket.
This mark of respect, the Vigil of the Princes, had been done only once before, at the-lying-in-state of father-in-law George V. Charles later returned for a private visit.
For the funeral at Westminster Abbey on April 9 more than a million people lined a 23-mile route from central London to her resting place beside her husband and younger daughter in St George’s Chapel, Windsor.
Ten days later, the Queen attended another state memorial service at Westminster Abbey, this time for her sister Margaret.
It was two devastating blows to the monarch. “The last of her original family had gone,” says Sun royal photographer Arthur Edwards.
“She and her mother were so close. They rang each other every day, discussed horse racing and events and what was in the papers and the latest gossip. The Queen absolutely loved gossip.”
Afterwards, Her Majesty drew closer to daughter Anne and Prince Edward’s wife Sophie, Countess of Wessex, especially during the Covid crisis and after the Duke of Edinburgh’s death in April 2021.
But perhaps the deep warmth and love she shared with her mother and sister was only repeated when her grandchildren and great-grandchildren came along.
The Queen had been quite formal with her own children, focused on her job.
That had changed with the arrival of the first of her eight grandchildren, Peter Phillips, born to Princess Anne on November 15, 1977.
Overjoyed, the new grandmother saw that the occasion was marked with a 41-gun salute at the Tower of London.
Soon, a young boy was rampaging around the royal palaces again — and accidentally learning a lot.
Peter, the only royal grandchild to own a corgi, recalled: “From my early childhood, ever since I was causing havoc in the corridors of Windsor, Balmoral and Sandringham with my sister and cousins, it was impossible to ignore the standard my grandmother set.
“She has been an inspirational person throughout my life.”
Princess Anne and then-husband Captain Mark Phillips declined the Queen’s offer of a title for Peter, who became the first legitimate grandchild of a British monarch to go without one. His sister Zara became the second when she came along in 1981.
The next year, on June 21, 1982, Prince William was born — the grandchild destined to inherit the crown.
The day after his birth the Queen, visiting at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, told Princess Diana: “Thank goodness he hasn’t got ears like his father.”
The Queen hoped William’s arrival would soothe the troubles in Charles and Diana’s marriage — and it did for a time, at least so it seemed to her. But a few years later Her Majesty was worrying about Diana’s effect on William and brother Harry, who was born in 1984.
She thought William and Harry were “badly behaved” because Diana did not discipline them.
“The pair were allowed to run riot,” royal commentator Ingrid Seward says, “racing up and down corridors and shouting like little boys do.”
But was Diana’s lack of “discipline” simply her attempt to give her sons a more “normal” childhood?
After Diana’s death in 1997, the Queen took responsibility for William and Harry, then aged 15 and 12. She made one of the biggest blunders of her reign, not coming to London after the tragedy — but it was an attempt to protect the boys.
After Diana, the Queen worked hard to agree with the media that the boys would be off-limits until they had completed their full-time education. It gave them the space that had been denied previous modern royals.
“In the case of William it changed the course of history,” says former Sun royal writer Duncan Larcombe. “Because of the media deal, he was allowed as future King to meet Kate Middleton at university and for their romance to slowly build.”
But the Queen soon became deeply concerned about Harry, who was going off the rails. “From the moment his mother died, Prince Harry wanted to throw in the towel,” says Larcombe.
“He didn’t want to be a royal and rebelled against it. I’m not sure the Queen really knew what to do about him.”
At Eton he scored some of the lowest results in the college’s history. His behaviour in his “gap year” brought the Queen’s media agreement to an end.
Stories emerged of him charging drunkenly around the world chasing beautiful women.
In October 2004 he “attacked” a photographer outside Pangaea nightclub in London’s West End and then, in January 2005, turned up at a fancy dress party dressed as a Nazi.
Later that year, after the Queen and his father urged him to get his life together, Harry enrolled in the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst.
And in April 2006, the 21-year-old was among 220 officer cadets inspected by Her Majesty at their graduation parade. During the ceremony, the beaming Queen stopped in front of a grinning Harry and said: “Now this is a face I recognise.”
The Queen had a simpler relationship with her other grandchildren, particularly Prince Andrew’s children Beatrice, born in 1988, and Eugenie, born in 1990 — both princesses after their father requested the title for them.
Despite the family’s troubles with their mother Sarah Ferguson, Beatrice and Eugenie were very much favourites of the Queen.
And Zara, of course, bonded with her grandmother over horses, going on to win a silver equestrian medal at the 2012 London Olympics.
The Queen’s youngest grandchildren — Edward’s children Louise, born in 2003, and James, born in 2007 — have stayed mainly out of the spotlight.
The Queen became a great-grandmother for the first time in December 2010, when Peter Phillips and then-wife Autumn Kelly had daughter Savannah.
It was a happy time for the royal grandchildren.
The previous month, William announced his engagement to Kate Middleton. The monarch pronounced herself “absolutely delighted” and set about helping them plan the big day. William later revealed how officials had handed him a list of 777 guests that he should invite to the wedding — not one of whom he or Kate knew.
He went straight to the Queen. He said: “I said, ‘Listen, I’ve got this list, not one person I know. What do I do?’. She went, ‘Get rid of it. Start from your friends and we’ll add those we need in due course. It’s your day.’ ”
Willia and Kate had their first child, Prince George, in 2013, followed by Princess Charlotte in 2015 and Prince Louis in 2018.
The following year on May 6, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, gave birth to Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor, who the Queen first met at Windsor Castle two days later.
In a photo taken with Prince Philip and Meghan’s mother Doria Ragland, the Queen beams at Archie, her eighth great-grandchild.
The Queen, committed to an engagement, could not attend the baby’s christening by the Archbishop of Canterbury at Windsor, when Harry and Meghan refused to name their baby’s godparents and at first declined to have a photocall. It was the first public hint of the worst Royal Family split since Edward VIII’s abdication.
“There was absolutely no reason why people shouldn’t know his godparents,” says Ingrid Seward. “I think the Queen found that a little unusual.”
It was even more unusual when, two years later, with the trauma of Megxit still rumbling, Harry and Meghan chose the Queen’s childhood name for their daughter, born in California on June 4, 2021.
Palace sources told the BBC they had not asked the Queen before naming the baby Lilibet Diana. But the couple said Harry had mentioned it to his grandmother and she had been “supportive” and they fired off legal letters to the media warning that to suggest otherwise would be “defamatory”.
Perhaps the best insight into the Queen’s excitement and love for her grandchildren and their children came in a 2016 TV interview with the Duke of Cambridge.
Prince William said: “I think there were moments when she loved the noise . . . it brought the house to life and made a real family atmosphere. And there were other moments when I think she wanted to smack us all over the head and tell the noisy children to go next door.”
Once at Balmoral, he revealed, he and cousin Peter Phillips were on a quad bike chasing Zara in a go-cart: “Peter and I managed to herd Zara into a lamppost and the lamppost came down and nearly squashed her. My grandmother was the first person out, running across the lawn in her kilt.
“She came charging over and gave us the most almighty b*****king.”
William added: “She’s been a very strong influence and, having lost my mother at a young age, it’s been particularly important to me that I’ve had somebody like the Queen to look up to, and who has been there and understood some of the more complex issues when you lose a loved one.”
To mark her 90th birthday in 2016, the Queen posed for renowned celebrity portrait photographer Annie Leibovitz with youngest grandchildren Louise and James plus the five great-grandchildren she had at the time: George and Charlotte, Savannah and Isla Phillips, and Zara’s daughter Mia Tindall. Mia stole the show by holding Her Majesty’s handbag for the occasion.
Two years later, the Queen shared tips on how to cope with the grandkids at Christmas in a documentary with Sir David Attenborough.
Talking of tree decorations, she said: “That is always the problem — the children love knocking those off. Well my great-grandchildren do, anyway.
“They enjoy themselves. And the great thing is to make them decorate it and they’re a bit more careful.”
With Princes George and Louis and Princess Charlotte, the Queen takes great comfort that the succession is assured for the rest of the century.
“You cannot put a value on how much it will have meant to the Queen to have spent time getting to know George, who ultimately will take her position,” says Duncan Larcombe.
“One day, as they place the crown on his head, his thoughts may well go back to the times he spent as a child with the lady he called ‘Gan-Gan’, his remarkable great-grandmother.”
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WELCOMING CAMILLA
By Martin Phillips
EVEN Prince Charles’ love life was proving less of a headache to the Queen.
The problem six years before was that, in the wake of Princess Diana’s death, Charles was continuing his affair with Camilla Parker Bowles. The Queen liked Camilla but banned her entering any royal premises or appearing on any royal guest list. Charles, however, insisted his mistress was “non-negotiable”.
While the Queen was on holiday in Balmoral, Charles held a party at Buckingham Palace and included Camilla on the guest list, cheekily suggesting in a speech that, “when the cat’s away, the mice will play”.
When the news reached the Queen in Scotland, she suddenly wondered what would happen if she died and Charles became King as an unmarried man with a mistress that many were still hostile to.
She decided that, since the problem of Camilla would not go away, she should be welcomed instead. She also believed that for Charles to be a good king he would need to be happy – and Camilla made him so.
So the Queen told Charles he should be seen openly with Camilla – at weekends to start with – and eventually be allowed to marry, which they did on April 9, 2005.
The Church of England had changed its rules three years earlier to allow a divorced person whose former spouse was still alive – as Camilla’s ex-husband Andrew Parker Bowles was – to wed in a religious ceremony.
But the Prince became the first member of the Royal Family to marry in a civil ceremony.
The Queen diplomatically avoided the service at Windsor Guildhall but attended a televised blessing after. She also hosted a lavish reception at Windsor Castle where, in a warm speech, she alluded to the Grand National when she said the newlyweds had, “overcome Becher’s Brook and The Chair and all kinds of terrible obstacles”.
She added: “I am very proud. My son is home and dry with the woman he loves. Welcome to the winner’s enclosure.”