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On November 27, 2017, the Prince of Wales was ‘delighted to announce the engagement of Prince Harry to Ms Meghan Markle’. The ‘Ms’ was noteworthy. The Queen had never much liked the term, and women being presented to her at garden parties were only asked if they wished to be introduced as ‘Miss’ or ‘Mrs’. However, times moved on and Harry’s fiancee, a divorced American actress, wanted to be ‘Ms’.

Harry had first introduced Meghan to the Queen the previous year, when his girlfriend was still based in Toronto, the location for her TV series, Suits. It had been an impromptu Sunday lunchtime encounter at Royal Lodge, the Windsor home of the Duke of York. Casually dressed, the young couple were on their way to see Princess Eugenie when they learned that the Queen had already dropped in on her way back from church.

Meghan had a quick crash-course in curtseying from Sarah, Duchess of York, in the garden, before going inside and bobbing down before the Queen (she was later heavily criticised for her irreverent reprise of the moment in a Netflix documentary). The 20-minute chat was deemed a great success on all sides, with the Queen happy to learn that Meghan was living and working in a Commonwealth country.

On the same day as the engagement announcement, Harry and Meghan appeared for the formal engagement photographs in the garden of Kensington Palace, followed by the customary television interview.

There were already a few signs that this was not going to be a re-run of the previous royal wedding. When William and Catherine announced their engagement in 2010, they also met the royal press corps over a cup of tea in St James’s Palace. Harry and Meghan had put the media on the far side of a pond in the garden on a grey afternoon and there would be no interaction.

In their television interview, the couple had also emphasized a ‘passion’ for ‘change’. The Queen would be more encouraged by the fact that they also talked excitedly about the Commonwealth. Overall, it felt like a very modern romance. St George’s Chapel, Windsor, was booked for May 19, 2018.

While I have written previous books and documentaries on the monarchy over many years, this is my first entirely retrospective study of Elizabeth II (the others having been written while she was alive). A few weeks from now, she might have been in the delightful position of presenting herself with a 100th birthday card, though it was not to be.

Ahead of her centenary, I have decided to write an entirely new portrait, a more personal response to the eternal question: What was she really like? In doing so, I have unearthed much new material and fresh insights from every stage of her long life – such as the inside story of what has come to be known as ‘tiaragate’.

As the date grew nearer, a series of private and public dramas ensured that the marriage of Harry and Meghan would be quite unlike any previous royal wedding.

The couple had asked Princess Charlotte to be a bridesmaid, but tensions between Meghan and the Duchess of Cambridge over the bridesmaids’ dresses would reduce both women to tears.

Another pre-wedding row, which would continue to create headlines years after the wedding, concerned Meghan’s choice of tiara. The Queen much enjoyed offering a piece from her own tiara collection to a royal bride, when required.

She had not done so for Diana, who had wanted to wear the Spencer family tiara. Nor had she done so for Sarah Ferguson before her wedding to Prince Andrew, since the Queen herself commissioned a brand-new piece, known as the ‘York’ tiara, for the future Duchess of York (who continued to retain it after her divorce).

However, other brides would be invited to borrow one. ‘Her Majesty would pick out a small selection which she thought would suit that bride and ask her round to try them on and choose one,’ said a former staffer.

‘It was her lovely way of bonding with the bride. She did it with Sophie [Rhys-Jones] and with Catherine [Middleton]. But there wasn’t that bonding with Meghan because she turned up with Prince Harry.’

No one was entirely sure why the Prince had to come, too. His memoir suggests that it was a joint invitation; insiders say otherwise.

As Harry later wrote himself, it was a magical experience and Meghan had a clear favourite – Queen Mary’s diamond bandeau. However, the mood turned sour nearer the wedding when the couple rang the Palace to ask the Queen’s dresser and curator, Angela Kelly, to send over the tiara. Meghan wished to practise putting it on.

According to Spare, Prince Harry’s memoir, and also Finding Freedom, the sympathetic account of the couple’s royal woes by Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand, Kelly was proving to be aloof. ‘To my mind, Angela was a troublemaker,’ the Prince wrote, suggesting that the Queen’s dresser was being obstructive.

Matters came to a head when Meghan’s hairdresser flew in for a ‘hair trial’. ‘People were frustrated – and confused. Why was it so hard to set up a time for Meghan to try the tiara with her hairdresser?’ wrote Scobie and Durand, adding that Harry was forced to go directly to the Queen as a result.

The Prince, in his account, said that he did not. ‘I considered going to Granny, but that would probably mean sparking an all-out confrontation,’ he wrote, ‘and I wasn’t quite sure with whom Granny would side.’

Insiders have now revealed that word did, indeed, reach the Queen, who took the side of her dresser. She was not pleased that the Prince had been calling around the Royal Household demanding that the tiara be dispatched forthwith.

As the monarch told one of them: ‘It’s not a toy.’

She even recalled that, ahead of the 2011 royal wedding, Catherine Middleton’s hairdresser had practised using a plastic tiara from the accessory chain, Claire’s. Why could Meghan and her hairdresser not do the same? She told Kelly to ignore the phone calls.

There were also two reasons, said the insiders, why the tiara was not simply produced at the click of a finger to suit a visiting hairdresser (quite apart from the less-than-straightforward protocols for transporting royal gems).

First, it was Easter Court, with the Queen and her staff based at Windsor and also preoccupied with guests for the Royal Windsor Horse Show.

Second, and of greater importance, was the question of provenance. The diamond bandeau tiara had very little known history, beyond the fact that Queen Mary had commissioned it in 1932, using a diamond brooch – a wedding present from the county of Lincolnshire – as its centrepiece. It had seldom been seen in public since.

Angela Kelly and her team had been trying to verify that it had no awkward backstory – like the Timur ruby (alleged imperial loot) or the Cambridge emeralds (reclaimed at vast expense from Queen Mary’s dead brother’s mistress).

Every centrepiece of a royal wedding is subject to forensic global scrutiny. Even if the tiara had only a few offcuts from South Africa’s mighty Cullinan diamond, that could be enough to generate furious headlines about colonial theft. ‘Can you imagine how that would have gone down on the wedding day?’ asked one member of staff.

It had taken a great deal of research. Once due diligence had been done, there was great relief around the Palace. ‘Harry had been on to everyone about this. We thought Angela was like the fairy godmother who had delivered,’ said a source. ‘But when she called Kensington Palace, she was put through to Prince Harry who just said, “Get it here now”. And that was the end of the conversation.’

Harry later wrote that ‘Angela appeared out of thin air’ and asked him to sign a release for the tiara. He said that he thanked her but also added that ‘it would’ve made our lives so much easier to have had it sooner’.

Whereupon, according to his memoir: ‘Her eyes were fire. She started having a go at me.’ He had replied: ‘Angela, you really want to do this now? Really? Now?’

As would be the case with much of the Harry and Meghan story, recollections would vary.

As one staffer recalled: ‘There was already an atmosphere before Angela arrived. Meghan was nowhere to be seen. Harry poked the box and said “Is that it?” Then he stood over Angela and said he did not like her whining to his grandmother.

‘Angela gave it straight back. She said that she did not like him getting all these people to push her when she was just doing her job. She tried to tell him about the history and how it was for their own sake, but he walked out. She decided to put it down to pre-wedding nerves.’

‘All Angela did,’ said a former colleague, ‘was to try to protect them’.

All royal weddings have had their glitches, but never quite like this one. Meghan would have no family present at the ceremony except her mother and her divorced father, Thomas Markle, a retired television lighting director, now living in Mexico.

He was under orders from the couple to say nothing to the Press, but was increasingly upset at media depictions of him as an oddball recluse. So he hatched a secret deal whereby a news agency would take flattering pictures of him preparing for the big day and then syndicate the images.

No sooner was the plan exposed than he was hospitalised with a heart attack and suddenly he wasn’t coming. The bride’s family was down to one, so who would walk her up the aisle?

Harry’s father asked Meghan if he might have the honour of accompanying her to the altar. According to Harry, the offer ‘very much helped’ Meghan get over the pain of her father’s no-show.

According to a friend, the Prince of Wales was somewhat surprised by Meghan’s reply: ‘Can we meet half way?’ She wanted to make her grand entrance to the chapel alone. The Prince would then wait at the entrance to the Quire for the last few yards to the altar.

Hundreds of thousands packed Windsor’s Long Walk on that cloudless May morning. Inside the castle, the guests had all arrived via a fleet of courtesy buses. Here was a collection of Harry’s friends from school, the military and his Gloucestershire childhood mixing with Meghan’s showbusiness cohorts.

One royal friend remembers spotting actor George Clooney and US talk-show host Oprah Winfrey wandering around St George’s Chapel looking at engravings and royal tombs.

‘I happened to be standing with Oprah and I said, “Hi, there”. I just thought I’d better make conversation. I think people like this couldn’t believe that they were in this old English church just wandering around. No one was giving them food or drink but no one was bothering them either, no one was taking photos, everyone was ignoring them. So it’s just me and Oprah. It was bizarre. I think they liked this weird Englishness.’

On the morning of the wedding, the Queen had made Harry the Duke of Sussex, a title last created for one of the wayward sons of King George III (it had died with him in 1843). Like the entire country, she was thrilled to see one of the monarchy’s greatest assets finally find the happiness and the family unit he had craved.

For much of the world over a certain age, the abiding image of Harry was that shellshocked little boy walking behind his mother’s coffin in 1997. He had been with his brother then. Now the warrior prince was there at the altar, blinking hard, with his brother beside him again.

Five months later, on October 12, 2018, St George’s Chapel Windsor held another wedding for another of the Queen’s grandchildren. Princess Eugenie, younger daughter of the Duke of York, was marrying drinks executive Jack Brooksbank.

Status-conscious as ever, Prince Andrew and his ex-wife, Sarah, had been determined that Eugenie should have a comparable wedding to Harry, with live television coverage, a carriage procession, celebrity guests and so on, albeit in front of a smaller audience.

The Queen happily agreed to Andrew’s demands. After all, Eugenie and Jack had been patient. After a seven-year romance, they had been thinking of marrying sooner but had been content to let Harry and Meghan go first, in line with the royal pecking order (the hierarchy did not always work against Harry and Meghan, despite some of their subsequent complaints).

Even before Meghan had selected Queen Mary’s diamond bandeau, Eugenie had already been round to see the Queen to choose her tiara – the seldom-seen Greville emerald kokoshnik. She had gone alone, without her fiance. Though some had expected her to wear the York tiara which had been made for her mother, it was not entirely surprising that she did not.

Just weeks before Harry’s wedding, the Commonwealth member states had formally declared that Prince Charles would be the next head of the organisation upon his accession to the Throne.

The Queen also wanted to strengthen family ties between the Commonwealth and the next generation, too. With that in mind, she appointed Harry as her Commonwealth Youth Ambassador.

The monarch was also keen for Meghan to learn the royal ropes (despite subsequent complaints from the Sussex camp that the Duchess was offered little training). The Queen invited her to leave Harry behind and join her, one-on-one, for an overnight trip to Cheshire in the royal train.

‘The Queen was really wanting to give it a go,’ an insider recalled. ‘She was so sweet, she had brought Meghan a present and tried so hard. The train always left at 11 o’clock at night and the Queen was on the platform to welcome her. They had breakfast together in the morning and she was always trying to do small things, to show her the ropes and bring her in.’

The Sussexes’ first official overseas trip together would be a Commonwealth tour, an extensive journey across the Pacific. It began with a happy surprise. The Duchess was expecting a baby. She made it clear that the tour would proceed as planned. And so it did.

Back at home, work was under way to help Meghan build a portfolio of patronages with meaning. The Queen was keen on two in particular. After 45 years as patron of the National Theatre, she wanted to hand it on to Meghan, given her acting credentials.

It was even suggested that the Duchess might have the occasional walk-on part in stage productions (a sweet idea, though one possibly unlikely to appeal to a former television star).

Another important gift from the Queen was the Association of Commonwealth Universities. ‘It would allow Meghan a platform to give speeches with substance around the world. She could talk about, say, women’s rights in Africa but without being political,’ explained a Palace aide. ‘The Queen knew it was time to hand these on and was really excited for Meghan. The Sussexes were in a good place.’

Within Kensington Palace, relations soon started to cool between the Cambridges and the Sussexes. Despite wildly over-optimistic talk of a new royal ‘dream team’ or, even more fancifully, a ‘Fab Four’, resentments were growing. The Sussexes, like any exciting new prospect, were attracting the bulk of the media attention and invitations at this stage. Yet, they had a smaller staff, a smaller budget and a very much smaller house.

In March 2019 it was announced that the brothers would be splitting their offices. The Cambridges would keep their headquarters at Kensington Palace while Harry and Meghan would move their home to Frogmore Cottage on the Windsor estate and look for a new office at Buckingham Palace.

Once there was a change of monarch, William would become Prince of Wales and inherit the Duchy of Cornwall. Harry, who would still be dependent on his father, would then have to swap cost centres and become part of the King’s operation. Hence the need to move the Sussexes to Royal HQ at some point. Why not now, while the Palace was undergoing major restoration work?

The problem, say insiders, was the way it was handled. ‘They were dealing with two brothers but they treated it like a corporate split, with Harry being farmed off to a new sales division,’ was the impression of one Palace veteran.

Internal tensions would work both ways. As Meghan’s own supporters pointed out, she had arrived from a world in which offers of clothes and discounts were an accepted trade-off for celebrity endorsement.

‘It had to be explained that, aside from official gifts, which were registered, anything else had to be paid with a proper bill to show the Keeper of the Privy Purse,’ one staff member recalled. ‘The Palace can’t take freebies. Let’s just say that did not go down well.’

Harry’s book recorded gravely that one member of staff had been fired for trying ‘to get freebies’ but then went on to praise Meghan because ‘she shared all the freebies she received’.

The rules and hierarchies would also work in the Sussexes’ favour, too. One Palace staffer was dismayed after working for weeks on a major news event for one of the Duchess of Cornwall’s charities only to be told to shelve it because it would clash with a big announcement for Prince Harry’s Invictus Games.

The couple’s dislike and distrust of the media was such that, on May 6, 2019, when the Duchess gave birth to a healthy baby boy, Archie, both were back home even as the media received a bulletin saying that she had gone into hospital.

The Palace was then accused of lying, and not only by the Press. The Metropolitan Police had gone to considerable trouble to create a strategy for crowd control around the hospital. ‘People from the Met were calling up the Palace and asking why we had lied – which we hadn’t,’ said one royal staffer caught in the middle. ‘The Sussexes just hadn’t told anyone. I think it was one area where no one could tell Meghan what to do. It was a case of “I’m going to show you who’s boss”.’

At the end of 2019, the couple left Britain for a quiet Christmas in Canada before returning to Britain early in the New Year. They then suddenly issued an unprecedented statement after the end of the working day on January 8. They would now be seeking a ‘progressive new role’, ‘stepping back’ from royal duties while supporting the Queen on both sides of the Atlantic.

They were certainly not expecting the Palace to move as swiftly and firmly as it did, with an almost immediate response from ‘Royal Communications’. It stated baldly that these were ‘complicated issues’ and would ‘take time to work through’. In fact, they would not take much time at all.

What the Press instantly branded as ‘Megxit’ had a different name within the Palace. The family talked about ‘UDI’, a reference to the Rhodesian crisis of the mid-Sixties when the minority white government there issued its ‘unilateral declaration of independence’ from Britain. That had not ended well.

The Queen and the Prince of Wales were as one on the need for speed: The longer the absence of clarity, they agreed, the greater the scope for misunderstanding.

Meghan had already returned to Canada when the Queen invited Harry to Sandringham for a family meeting a few days later. There would be no conference call dial-in from Canada either. No one could be sure who else might be listening in.

Those on the Palace side look back with some sympathy. ‘That so-called “Sandringham Summit” was quite brutal,’ said one of those present. ‘But the Queen was absolutely solid from the start: No half-in, half-out.’

Grudgingly, the couple chose out.

The day she thought Philip had been shot behind her

Elizabeth II never liked to dwell on the various terrifying events which occurred in her long life. In 1982, she awoke to find a strange barefoot man called Michael Fagan at the end of her bed holding the sharp edge of a broken glass ashtray and dripping blood on the floor. She calmly kept him talking until help arrived.

Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the story is that, four hours later, she would go on to hold an investiture for more than 100 people. None would have the faintest idea that the Queen had just endured the stuff of horror films.

The previous year, she had gone through an equally horrific experience when a gunman opened fire (with blanks, it transpired) as she was riding down the Mall on her Birthday Parade. Onlookers applauded her cool response as she calmed her mare, Burmese, and rode on.

Now, it can finally be revealed just how troubling it actually was.

As a former close aide explained: ‘She had no idea they were blanks. And when she saw the police running past, she feared the worst. She said to me, “I saw all the attention heading behind me and I thought that someone had shot my husband”. It was unusual for her to say “husband”, which is why I remember it so well.

‘And she explained that she just kept staring ahead and going forwards because that is what you do. She said to herself, “Don’t look back”, because she was afraid she might see the Duke’s body. It was her way of dealing with it.’

Grainy film footage shows the moment after she has turned the corner on to Horse Guards and realises that the parade appears to be continuing. It is only then that she allows herself a quick glance over her left shoulder. The look on her face after seeing that the Duke is trotting along behind is one of unabashed joy. Indeed, it was possibly the smiliest that Elizabeth II had ever been on a parade ground.

‘Funnily enough, it’s one of those things you often think about riding down the Mall: Who might at any minute do something crazy?’ Prince Charles reflected years later. ‘You must continue as Mama did. You can’t rush off in panic.’

Yet because there was no live ammunition, the incident tends to be downplayed or even forgotten. I mentioned it to another member of that exclusive club of world leaders who have been shot at in public – and survived. ‘I didn’t know about that,’ replied a surprised Donald Trump.

===

As prime minister, David Cameron would have a lot to do with the Queen and her family during some of her happiest years.

Yet there was an awkward moment early on when he had to sack the Duke of York from his role as an ambassador for British trade in 2011.

By this point, The Mail on Sunday had revealed that the Duke had not only maintained his friendship with a convicted American sex offender called Jeffrey Epstein, but had stayed at the financier’s New York home since Epstein’s release from prison.

A photograph then emerged of the Prince with an arm around a teenage girl who had been abused by Epstein. Thus began Andrew’s slow 14-year descent to ex-royal pariah status.

‘I think I was responsible for gently saying to Her Majesty that he had to stand down as a trade envoy,’ Cameron recalled. ‘It was all pretty much fixed. But I was just to reference it for the official log. The Queen was worried about him but she could see the logic.’

It was not just the Duke’s Epstein connection which was the problem. ‘It had been getting embarrassing,’ Cameron recalled.

‘Andrew kept turning up to things and making terrible remarks. I’d seen it myself at Davos [the World Economic Forum], where he was going to his receptions and was just a bit crass. He had his way of doing things and it wasn’t what you wanted. He was very good with all the tyrants but he started being opinionated, saying we were too squeamish about dealing with these people. His speeches would always just have three or four inappropriate things.

‘Unlike the rest of the royals, who were very good at knowing where to stray and where not to stray, he was straying all over the place.’

Andrew was at the peak of his oafishness at this point, exemplified by his behaviour just weeks before his 2011 demotion. An eminent public servant was arriving with his family and several hundred other guests on their way to an investiture at Buckingham Palace.

‘We were walking across the quadrangle and suddenly this blue Bentley appeared and did a handbrake turn, throwing up gravel over other people’s cars,’ a family member recalled.

‘Someone said, “I bet that’s Andrew.” And sure enough it was. And everyone was talking about it as we went in because it had just spoiled things. He lived at Buckingham Palace, whereas we were just the little people going in there for our big day. And he just had to make it all about him.’

There had been a similar episode at Windsor a few years earlier, when grooms from the Royal Mews had been riding some of the Queen’s horses on the estate.

One had waved a firm hand at an approaching car which was revving its engine aggressively. It pulled alongside and, through the window, the Duke of York bellowed at her: ‘Who the f*** do you think you are?’ He then demanded her name. ‘What’s more, he even took it up with the Queen – in person,’ a former member of the Household recalled. Nothing was done.

At home and abroad, similar stories would do the rounds (and continue to emerge). One British diplomat in Moscow would remember a trade-related visit by the Duke, during which his top priority seemed to be the acquisition of a fur hat: ‘He had a selection of them delivered to his hotel late in the evening – come to think of it, by some very pretty shop assistants.’

The birth of Prince Andrew on February 19, 1960, has sometimes been likened to the start of the Queen’s second family. The baby’s name was another fillip for Philip, being that of his late father. So, too, was the Queen’s plea to the government shortly before the birth, when she told the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, that she wanted to change the family surname, for all those born in the future through her own line, to Mountbatten-Windsor.

No one could possibly have imagined that, decades later, the princely child who had been the catalyst for the new surname would be the first to be a plain ‘Mr’ Mountbatten-Windsor.

It has long since become received media and public wisdom that Andrew was the Queen’s ‘favourite son’. One family friend put it slightly differently: ‘He’d been this wonderful baby after the ten-year gap with her older children. He wasn’t sensitive like Charles but, rather, all things that her husband had been – a straightforward, handsome naval officer. On the other hand, he was a seven-year-old who never grew up.’

Some of these childlike tendencies could be almost endearing, like his collection of teddy bears. Others suggested more deep-rooted issues. ‘He never drank alcohol and always stuck to room-temperature water,’ the friend continued. ‘Fair enough, but I once asked him why and he answered like a child: “I tasted it once when I was a teenager and I didn’t like it.” That’s why the Queen would always worry about him.’

Following Andrew’s marriage to Sarah Ferguson in 1986, the Royal Family appeared to be in full bloom, with another young glamour couple at the monarchy’s disposal. The Duke of York would continue his career in the Royal Navy while the Duchess built a portfolio of charities. Like Lilibet and Margaret six decades earlier, there would be a new pair of York princesses: Beatrice, born in 1988, and Eugenie, born in 1990.

Rumours of cracks in the marriage were confirmed in January 1992 when a batch of photographs surfaced in the Press showing the Duchess of York holidaying with an American oil executive, Steve Wyatt, who was clearly more than just a good friend.

The Duke and Duchess started consulting divorce lawyers. In March, news leaked that the Yorks were formally separating. It was not only personally painful for the Queen but constitutionally embarrassing too, as the story bumped the forthcoming general election off the front pages.

This was what the Queen would call her ‘annus horribilis’, the year of royal marriage breakdowns, media batterings and a terrible fire at Windsor Castle.

Few moments caused her more pain, however, than the morning of August 20. The royal party – including both the newly separated Yorks – came down to breakfast to find that the Daily Mirror had nine pages of intimate photographs of a topless Duchess and her ‘financial adviser’, John Bryan, by the swimming pool of a villa in the South of France.

A French paparazzo had been able to take the images at leisure despite the presence of two police officers protecting the Duchess’s daughters.

The Yorks finally divorced in 1996, though they would remain close for the sake of their daughters. The Duke’s career in the Royal Navy came to an end in 2001. ‘We did press the Navy very hard to keep him on but they couldn’t find a suitable role,’ a senior royal aide now admits.

That was the start of his appointment by Tony Blair’s government as an unpaid trade envoy for the UK. The Duke would make trade missions across the former Soviet empire, and became so friendly with the oil-rich republic of Kazakhstan that, in 2007, the president’s son-in-law agreed to buy the Duke’s former marital home, Sunninghill Park, for £3million more than the asking price.

Even after being removed from the envoy role in 2011, the Duke of York had continued pursuing questionable business dealings with questionable regimes. However, he had also developed a successful programme for business start-ups called Pitch@Palace, which had gone some way to rehabilitating his tarnished image.

Then, early in 2019, the spectre of Jeffrey Epstein loomed once more when the Duke was named in a new court action. In July, the paedophile was behind bars again facing new charges of sex trafficking. In August, he committed suicide, though there would be plenty of theories that he had been murdered.

The BBC’s Panorama was now working on an investigation that would include an interview with Virginia Giuffre (nee Roberts), an Epstein victim who claimed she had been forced to have sex with the Duke when she was 17.

Rather than respond to Panorama’s request for comment, the Duke decided it would be better to tell his own story to the BBC’s Newsnight programme – and interviewer Emily Maitlis.

Over the course of 45 minutes, in November 2019, he insisted that he had ‘no recollection’ of meeting Roberts and produced a bizarre series of alibis and excuses to debunk her story.

Quite apart from the technicalities, it was the lack of self-awareness that made it such gripping television. Bordering on tragic was the fact that he thought it had all gone rather well, and called the Queen to tell her so.

Within the family and the Royal Household, there was cold fury that he had gone against all internal advice and had somehow obtained the Queen’s consent to bring cameras into the Palace. ‘Everyone in his office had been told that this should not happen,’ said a senior official of that period.

‘The Duke had an overriding belief that he was better than the rest of us,’ said the Lord Chamberlain, Earl Peel.

‘His self-confidence and entitlement was off the scale.’

The Duke’s charities, some of which had very long royal connections, were now disowning him. In tandem with the Prince of Wales, the Queen could see no alternative to Andrew’s removal from public life. After all, public duties only work when the public wants to see someone, as they manifestly did not in this case. The only concession would be that he could frame it as his own magnanimous decision, which he did.

Preparing Andrew’s letter of resignation, said one of those involved, was ‘the worst’ moment that they could recall for the Queen. ‘She was very, very down. She was very stoical. She understood the need. But it was very, very painful.’

Around the Palace, memories were still fresh of a recent physical altercation after the Duke demanded that the Master of the Household, Vice Admiral Tony Johnstone-Burt, accommodate an event for his Pitch@Palace.

‘It was a routine household matter. The Duke wanted to have a reception and there wasn’t any room. It was as simple as that,’ recalled a senior member of staff. ‘Tony said he’d have to wait his turn like anybody else and the Duke went for him.’ It was not just an outburst of expletives and a jab of a finger but what one member of staff described as a ‘kinetic’ blow. Even by Andrew’s standards, it caused astonishment.

Johnstone-Burt had been a helicopter pilot during the Falklands war, like Andrew. He had then gone on to a very distinguished Royal Naval career, rising to captain of the carrier HMS Ocean and commanding Joint Helicopter Command before becoming a popular, long-serving Master of the Household.

His department included more royal employees than any other and had established protocols for workplace incidents. Johnstone-Burt reported the matter to his boss, the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Peel, who raised it with the Prince of Wales, who in turn raised it with the Duke.

The Lord Chamberlain then received a call from Andrew, who was unapologetic. ‘I gather you’ve been calling people and causing problems,’ he said.

So Lord Peel went to see the Duke in person and made it very clear: ‘I’ve been told you’ve been treating members of the Household in a wholly inappropriate way. It’s got to stop.’

The incident with the Master of the Household was not formally raised with the Queen, since it had been raised with almost everyone else. The Duke’s behaviour was so alarming that it stirred Prince Philip from his retirement to write a letter of apology to Johnstone-Burt. Andrew was prevailed upon to write one himself (described by one member of staff as a ‘sorry – not sorry’ letter).

When the matter did reach the Queen and a senior member of staff tried to downplay it to spare her blushes, she was unfazed. ‘Oh, I’m sure he did it,’ she replied. ‘That’s the sort of thing he does.’ There would be no further manhandling of staff. The episode would also explain why, as Andrew found himself ostracised from public life, he was so bereft of Palace allies (and also why royal staff still talk about the 2013 BBC comedy drama Ambassadors, featuring a boorish minor royal trade envoy called ‘Prince Mark’).

In private, however, Andrew still had the Queen’s ear. ‘She was always worried about him. She saw him as vulnerable and felt he had been manipulated by bad people and she took him at his word,’ said one long-serving member of the Royal Household.

‘He was like his father in that he could be rude to people, but he was just not as intelligent. He’d be at a telecoms event and he’d ask “What’s Orange?” and everyone would go: “What did he just say?” He created a character that allowed him to survive in the circles he mixed in, which was this rude, blustering, boring man.

‘But I’ll also say that it’s so incongruous, this idea of him chasing young girls. Because he did have girlfriends but they were all age-appropriate. He sometimes went to nightclubs but he did not drink, he did not take drugs. There was nothing predatory about him.’

One friend of both Andrew and his nemesis during the Epstein years recalled that the Prince was particularly fond of a friend of Epstein who was certainly not underage. Indeed, Andrew was only four years older than CNN business reporter Felicia Taylor (the daughter of actor Rod Taylor; she died in 2023 aged just 59).

‘Felicia came to stay at Royal Lodge when Fergie and the girls were away,’ said this source, adding that Epstein would mock the Prince behind his back while simultaneously using him to open doors: ‘Jeffrey used to make fun of Andrew and say how “dumb” he was. He told me he was taking Andrew on the planes to meet these dictators and do business deals. Andrew would mean they would get into receptions and meet people and Jeffrey would do a deal and he said he gave Andrew a cut.’

The same friend remembered meeting Andrew at Royal Lodge during his annual New Year ‘retreat’, when he would have the house to himself while his ex-wife and daughters were on one of their winter holidays.

He was undergoing various rejuvenating and cleansing therapies in the basement. Andrew told the friend that this was ‘what [Princess] Diana had told him to do so that he could then go back to his partying’. Or, as Andrew put it in an email to Epstein: ‘This week is all about me; for one week of the year it’s great, time to put something back into me before the rest of the world starts sucking it out in all their greed and demands.’

As the former royal staffer put it: ‘He can talk about golf and helicopters but he can’t talk about anything else. He doesn’t read. He doesn’t have many friends and he never grew up. He was a sitting duck for someone like Epstein.’

The Queen was not blind, however, to the wider problems raised by Andrew’s living arrangements. In her final years, she had come to the conclusion that Andrew should no longer live at Royal Lodge. Both his daughters had married and left home and the Queen was now paying the costs of maintenance and security. There could be no use of public funds to secure the home of a man with no public role.

‘I remember the Queen looked out of the window and said: “Andrew to Frogmore and William to Royal Lodge.” That was the plan,’ a lunch guest from that time recalled. She had loved Royal Lodge as a child and wanted a new generation of royal children to enjoy her little Welsh cottage and the swimming pool.

The only problem with her plan was that William and Catherine did not want to live there. For now, the Cambridges preferred Adelaide Cottage, a much more modest four-bedroom home often occupied by courtiers and currently used by the Queen’s cousin, Simon Rhodes, a great-nephew of the Queen Mother.

When Rhodes was informed that the Duchess of Cambridge and her mother would like to come round with a tape measure, say friends, he realised that his days were numbered. It also meant a stay of eviction for the Duke of York.

Since the death of the Queen, the King has shown a surprising capacity for both tolerance and severity. After her death, many had expected that the then Duke of York would be ostracised; but the King took a conciliatory approach as he attempted to persuade his brother to downsize, cut costs and move to Frogmore Cottage, former home of the Sussexes.

When his brother refused, the King cut his living allowance. When it transpired that Andrew’s account of severing ties with Jeffrey Epstein was manifestly untrue, the King stripped him of all titles and honours and banished him from Royal Lodge to a farmhouse on the Sandringham estate – just as an exhaustive cache of irreparably damning Epstein emails and photos were being released by the US Department of Justice.

The decision left other members of the family actually fearing for Andrew’s health, especially after one of his final visitors at Royal Lodge found him babbling that being Duke of York had simply been ‘an avatar’ and that he could now discover ‘the real me’.

Another visitor was treated to a half-hour lecture from him on how to make the perfect cup of tea.

By the spring of 2026, the release of millions more court documents showed the extent of Epstein’s closeness to Andrew, the ex-Duchess and even the couple’s daughters. When Andrew – like the disgraced Labour peer Lord Mandelson – was accused of forwarding confidential UK government reports to Epstein (while he was still UK trade envoy), demands for a full investigation intensified.

In February he was arrested, marking a new low point for the modern monarchy. While it confirmed the King’s prescience in defenestrating his brother, it raised more questions about how Andrew had been allowed to behave so badly for so long in the past.

Withering power of 'The Look'

All of the Queen’s staff dreaded ‘The Look’ – a silent signal of displeasure towards those who crossed an invisible line, usually involving over-familiarity, incompetence or plain rudeness.

As Tony Blair observed: ‘She can be matey with you, but don’t try to reciprocate or you get “The Look”.’ One prime minister on the receiving end of it was New Zealand’s Helen Clark, during the Queen’s Golden Jubilee tour of the Pacific in 2002.

The centrepiece was Clark’s black-tie banquet. The Queen duly arrived in a white evening gown of lace and pearl, plus tiara. She was met by her hostess wearing trousers. ‘The poor Queen turned up as planned in a full ballgown and tiara, and Helen Clark tried to score points,’ recalled a member of the entourage. ‘It was just rude and rather embarrassing.

‘The Queen did not get angry or say anything. But she understood very well when people were point-scoring. She was quite sanguine about it.’


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The late Queen came close to a nervous breakdown during the turbulent summer of 1969, royal biographer Robert Hardman has claimed.

Speaking on the Daily Mail's Palace Authorised YouTube show, Hardman said Buckingham Palace announced Elizabeth II had come down with flu as cover for the fact she had cancelled all engagements and taken to bed.

Daily Mail columnist Hardman has researched the late Queen's reign extensively for his new book, Elizabeth II: In Private. In Public. The Inside Story. It released this month to celebrate what would have been her 100th birthday.

Hardman, quoting an unnamed Palace source, claimed the summer of 1969 was particularly stressful for the Queen due to Charles's investiture as Prince of Wales.

The Palace had planned for the event to be a lavish televised ceremony, the first of its kind in colour, taking place in front of the world's cameras at Caernarfon Castle in north-west Wales.

However, in the run-up to the ceremony, a Welsh separatist group had planted explosive devices in and around Caernarfon, with people killed both before and on the day of the investiture itself.

'The ceremony was going to be the coronation mark two', Hardman explained.

'It was a very tense moment. Only a few months later, the trouble started again in Northern Ireland.

'It was all over the world really - you just had the assassination of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy in America. People were really nervous, worried about the direction the world was heading in.'

Hardman said the pressure on the Queen and her family had been building steadily in the run-up to the investiture, adding that she was 'really worried that something was going to happen.'

'The Queen had always taken the view that if something happened to her, she'd live with it - die with it. It went with the territory. But this was the threat of terrorism against her son, his event and the family.

'Afterwards, Charles went off on a tour of Wales. The Queen went back to London to bed, cancelling all engagements for the week. Very, very unlike her.

'She was meant to be going to the Wimbledon Finals, had various garden parties, things to do. The whole lot was cancelled.'

Despite Charles being successfully invested as Prince of Wales, the Queen was said to have been left overwhelmed by the weight of the threat against her son and family.

'The Palace said she was suffering from the flu - an odd thing to be suffering from in early July', Hardman noted.

'Someone very close to her team told me that it wasn't flu, it was nervous exhaustion.

'I don't think you could call it a full nervous breakdown, because she was back on duty just over a week later - but it was the nearest thing to a nervous breakdown.'


https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/royals/article-15712661/queen-elizabeth-nervous-breakdown-1969-investiture-prince-charles-robert-hardman.html

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No monarch had marked 70 years on the Throne. Elizabeth II's Platinum Jubilee opened with her annual Birthday Parade. She did not appear in the procession but came out on to the Palace balcony at the end.

The following day, the Palace said she was 'too tired' to attend the service of Thanksgiving at St Paul's Cathedral. In fact, it had never been the plan that she would be there at all.

Appearing for a few minutes on the Palace balcony was fine; a whole church service was not. She would watch it on television, as would the Duke of York, who had miraculously contracted Covid for the entire jubilee weekend.

The Queen also missed the Epsom Derby and a special evening concert in front of the Palace before the jubilee concluded the next day with a 7,000-strong rolling pageant meandering the full length of the Mall and beyond.

Once again, the Queen was watching on television at Windsor until the Prince of Wales felt that she really had to be part of it. As the pageant concluded with Ed Sheeran singing in front of the Palace, the Royal Standard suddenly appeared on the flagpole above. The Queen had arrived through the back gate.

With the Mall now full to capacity with crowds, she emerged on the balcony in dark green, unaided but for her stick. Poor weather late in the day had ruled out the usual flypast by the Red Arrows. But no matter. On this occasion, the Queen herself had been the grand finale.

No one had stood on this balcony, waving and being waved at, more often than Elizabeth II. Ninety-five years on from her debut as a tiny child in the reign of George V, she went back through the French windows for the very last time.


The jubilee had exhausted the Queen. For the first time in her reign, she missed every single day of the Royal Ascot meeting, a sure sign something was amiss.

At the end of June, however, she travelled north to Edinburgh for her usual week of official events at the Palace of Holyroodhouse. If the Queen was going to conserve her energies for anything, it was for this traditional reminder of her central role in Scottish life.

The monarch then returned to Windsor for the final round of summer engagements ahead of her summer holiday at Balmoral. Though unspoken, many felt a sense of final farewell this time. Perhaps the Queen did too.

'She was so brave,' said an official who saw her regularly over the summer. 'You could tell she was having a lot of treatment from the bruising on her hands where the cannula had gone in. Her hands seemed permanently bruised.'

She went to see her fell pony, Emma, and her other horses for one last time. On the eve of her departure, she held the last round of audiences and a Privy Council meeting.

'We had a private chat at the end of it,' said one of those present. 'I felt a bit emotional when I left because, well, it just felt to me like a goodbye. She had some very clear messages about how she thought things would go in the future. Very clear, indeed!'

The Queen wanted all the great-grandchildren to come up to Balmoral at some point over that summer, even if the Sussexes might not be able to make it. 'She wanted to make sure that they all had a really happy memory of her,' explained a friend of the family.

Her exact medical condition has never been revealed. Those closest to her will only say that she had 'a number of things' in the late summer of 2022. Whatever the exact cause, she was well aware of her medical prognosis, and it had been enough to encourage her to tie up various loose ends.

She had also given thought to her funeral arrangements – though not much. Some members of the family took great delight in making these plans. The Queen Mother had always wanted to be updated whenever there was a rehearsal for her funeral, while Lord Mountbatten's endless changes to every aspect of his final farewell would exasperate officials.

Elizabeth II was well aware that many people had been planning her funeral for decades, but did not dwell on it. Indeed, one member of staff said she had to be nudged to nominate her choice of hymns after the clergy made a gentle request for guidance. Ever the pragmatist, she was still looking to the present, and had certainly not precluded a sudden return to London at short notice to appoint a new prime minister.

Boris Johnson's resignation as Tory leader had kickstarted a summer-long Conservative leadership contest which left the country listless for weeks. The Queen had therefore decided that whenever a leader was finally chosen, she would take the royal train down to London.

An official told me that she thought it would look 'selfish' to drag outgoing and incoming prime ministers up to the Highlands with television news cameras following them there and back. Besides, she believed the country needed to resume being governed as quickly as possible.

As the summer wore on, however, she was beginning to feel weaker again. In mid-August, she asked her officials if it might be acceptable for her to remain in Scotland. They assured her that it would be and, just to reassure her, they secured the approval of all the leadership candidates, too.

It was now becoming clear she might actually never head south again. She discussed it with her children. Typically, her concern was that she might be creating unnecessary problems for everyone else.

'There was a moment when she felt that it would be more difficult if she died at Balmoral,' said the Princess Royal. 'And I think we did try to persuade her that it shouldn't be part of the decision-making process. So I hope she felt that that was right in the end.'

On September 5, Liz Truss was formally declared the new Conservative leader and plans were set in motion for 'kissing hands' and her formal appointment the following day. The Queen was determined to effect the transition with all the dignity and correctness she had observed with all her prime ministers, going back to Winston Churchill. It would require a very great effort, though sadly no one would realise how much effort until later.

Johnson arrived at Balmoral shortly before noon on September 6 to resign, stayed for around 15 minutes and left. An hour later, Truss arrived to be appointed as the 15th British prime minister of the Queen's reign.

'She stood up to greet me,' Truss told me. 'She was clearly physically not very well but we talked for about twenty minutes. She was alert. I would say she was relieved that the thing had actually happened and that we were now moving things forward.'

The photograph of a beaming Queen, stick in hand, on her feet, in cardigan and Balmoral tartan in front of the Balmoral fireplace, would be the last image ever taken of Elizabeth II.

Were an animator to have drawn a bubble emanating from her head, it might have said: 'Job done.' She had sailed through her jubilee and had now put the country back on an even keel (not for long, though the Queen was not to know it).

There was only a small party in residence at the castle, including the Princess Royal who was, by good fortune, in the area undertaking engagements.

All gathered for early evening drinks where one of those present remembered the Queen 'quite buzzy' as she looked back on some of the prime ministers she had known. The day, however, had taken its toll. She then announced that she would be going upstairs to have dinner alone.

That night, back in London, Boris Johnson confided in friends that he had never seen the Queen look so weak. 'We were helping him to drown his sorrows after resigning, but he said that what really made him sad was that he wouldn't be around as prime minister to give the Queen a really good send-off – which he would have done because he was a wordsmith,' said one of his closest allies. 'He just said, 'She looked terribly, terribly frail'.'

There was, however, no cause for alarm until the following day, when the Queen said she would be staying in bed. That was unusual, even at this stage of life.

The local doctor, Douglas Glass from Ballater, was asked to drop by. He would regularly report in to the Queen's senior doctor, Sir Huw Thomas, the Head of the Royal Medical Household, but at this stage there was no need for medical backup.

Plans were put in place for the Queen to attend that evening's meeting of the Privy Council (a very important one following the change of government) through an audio link to the Downing Street conference suite. With minutes to go, the politicians in London were told that the meeting was off on 'medical advice'.

The Princess Royal had been keeping her elder brother updated at the other end of Scotland, where he was at Dumfries House with the Duchess of Cornwall. The following morning, the couple boarded a helicopter to Balmoral.

Rather than cause a commotion and disturb the Queen at the castle, they landed at their home at Birkhall. It was so last-minute that there was no car waiting. The Prince borrowed a Land Rover from a member of the estate staff and climbed into the driving seat.


By late morning, the Prince and the Duchess of Cornwall had spent an hour at the Queen's bedside. Since word would soon be spreading of all these royal movements, the Queen's private secretary, Sir Edward Young, knew that a bulletin was needed.

Normally, the Palace only issued medical statements if the Queen was hospitalised or missing an engagement. At 12.32, the Palace announced simply that she was 'under medical supervision' while remaining 'comfortable and at Balmoral'. The fact that the bulletin said nothing spoke volumes to those in the know.

Prince Charles and the Duchess decided to leave her to rest for a while. Princess Anne and the monarch's dresser Angela Kelly ensured that the Queen was never alone.

Even at this stage, there was no need for constant medical supervision or intervention. The current advice was to think in terms of days, perhaps even a week or two. No one was talking hours, let alone minutes.

Dr Glass remained at the little staff surgery inside the castle while the Rev Kenneth MacKenzie, minister at Crathie church and a chaplain to the Queen, sat at her bedside reading from the Bible.

A little after 3pm, there was an urgent call for Dr Glass to come upstairs. It appeared that the Queen had now stopped breathing. At the same time, the Princess Royal called Birkhall to alert the Prince of Wales that he needed to return as quickly as possible.

The prince had been out in the grounds picking mushrooms, as he liked to do in early autumn, while the Duchess was walking the dogs. The couple jumped back in the Land Rover with their tiny team and set off for the castle at speed.

The prince took the South Deeside Road, between the woods and the river, a route he had known all his life, and then veered off on to an even smaller back road leading into the estate.

Up in the Queen's bedroom, Dr Glass checked and checked again. There could be no doubt. His patient was at peace.

Sir Edward Young was waiting outside the room. Dr Glass went outside and confirmed to him that the Queen was dead. Young was now on autopilot. His duty was to tell the new sovereign immediately before telling anyone else.

He called Birkhall to be told that the prince was on his way. He asked the Balmoral switchboard to try all the mobile numbers of those in the small entourage in the hope that someone would have a signal.

The prince might only be minutes away, but there could be no risk of any delay through a puncture or, worse, some sort of accident. Eventually, one of the party could feel their phone vibrating and could see the call was from the switchboard.

The phone was passed to the prince's private secretary, Sir Clive Alderton, who answered, asked his boss to stop the car and handed him the device. For the first time, on a lonely, beautiful Highland roadside sitting in the driving seat of an old Land Rover, King Charles III was addressed as 'Your Majesty'.

Sir Edward Young duly asked the constitutional formalities. By what name would the King reign? (Charles.) And would His Majesty grant permission to call the Prime Minister? (Yes.) 'I'm nearly there,' the new monarch said, and put the car in gear.

A handwritten note by Sir Edward was immediately agreed with the doctor for clarity and posterity. It would also be very comforting for all who loved her. It stated: 'Dougie [Glass] in at 3.25. Very peaceful. In her sleep. Slipped away. Old age. Death has to be registered in Scotland. Agree 3.10pm. She wouldn't have been aware of anything. No pain.'
The footman she insisted waited on Paddington, too

For many of her subjects, their fondest final memory of Elizabeth II will always be her video appearance with Paddington Bear at the start of her Platinum Jubilee concert in June 2022 – complete with his trademark marmalade sandwiches.

This was a reprise of her glorious appearance with James Bond at the opening of the 2012 Olympics in her Diamond Jubilee year.

What viewers were not to know – until now – is that it was also a show of kindness and loyalty towards her staff.

The Bond sketch had featured the Queen's senior page, Paul Whybrew. The Queen thought it only fair that this film should include a walk-on part for her other trusty page, Barry Mitford.

The producers initially ruled out the idea, saying that the plot required just one footman – actor Simon Farnaby. 'They soon got a message passed back – No Barry, no Queen,' recalled one of those on set that day.

Sure enough, as well as seeing a scowling Farnaby playing his part, viewers worldwide would see a second footman in attendance – Barry Mitford.

The punchline was Paddington producing marmalade sandwiches from his hat only for the Queen to extract her own from her handbag – 'for later'.

There was no artifice. 'They had real marmalade in them,' said the source. 'So Angela Kelly made sure the Queen used an old handbag she would not be using again.'

Because of the computer-generated effects, the Queen had actually addressed her lines to a hat on a stick. 'She loved doing it. She enjoyed the whole process enormously,' said an aide.

The public loved it every bit as much as that Olympic skit a decade before. The James Bond film had been funny. So, too, was this one, except that it also had that deep emotional subtext as Paddington concluded: 'Happy Jubilee, Ma'am – and thank you, for everything.'





He might have been president of the Automobile Association but driving with the Duke of Edinburgh was always a trial.

Before his marriage to Princess Elizabeth, Prince Philip flipped a car into a ditch, much to the concern of royal staff: 'They did not feel that Philip should be allowed to drive the heir to the throne about London,' wrote her former governess, Marion 'Crawfie' Crawford.

He finally stopped in 2019 after a serious incident on the A149 near Sandringham. 'He was an appalling driver. When he had that accident I wasn't at all surprised,' admitted one Sandringham regular. 'He was always chatting away if there was a person in the passenger seat, usually a gamekeeper.

'And the Queen's driving was terrible, too. She would insist on driving one of the Land Rovers to a shooting lunch. Fortunately, someone else usually drove back.'


The Queen was always tickled by innocent mistakes. A long-running favourite was the tale of

Sylvi Kekkonen, wife of the president of Finland. Having muddled her medication on the morning of their state visit to London, the Finnish first lady swallowed sleeping pills instead of heart pills and had to be propped upright by Prince Philip and Princess Anne as she snoozed through the carriage procession to Buckingham Palace.

And when a senior courtier was invited for a weekend at Balmoral but had to explain that he was already hosting a house party at home, the Queen impishly replied: 'Well, I won't be asking you again.'



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