While I rarely read or cover Air Mail’s royal coverage, I did chance upon a recent piece by Craig Brown. Usually, Air Mail gets the dregs of the royal rota to write their Sussex-centered and Sussex-bashing royal pieces, but Brown is more of an old-school royal biographer. His piece is called “The Strange Afterlife of Queen Elizabeth II,” and it was published to mark what would have been QEII’s 100th birthday. He also wanted to talk about how quickly everyone moved on, including some fascinating observations about King Charles. But the biggest headline? One of QEII’s courtiers told Brown that she, the queen, believed that Harry and Meghan’s marriage would end in divorce.
Everyone moved on from QEII’s death quickly: After the lying-in-state, with its ten-mile queue, and the funeral, life in Britain returned to normal with an almost indecent haste. A year on, I visited Sandringham, and was surprised by quite how speedily the new King had changed things. The garden next to the house had been replanted for a looser, more relaxed and informal look. Unfortunately the King’s new topiary had failed to catch: half the hedges were looking miserable, and a laborious re-re-planting process was under way.
Everything’s about Charles & Camilla: Indoors, the drink coasters in the sitting room now bore the King’s cipher. With so much else on his mind, Charles had found time to bin his mother’s old coasters and replace them with his own. And the Sandringham gift shop was now full of Charles and Camilla books and memorabilia, with products bearing the image of the late Queen relegated to the lower shelves. The Queen is dead! Long live the King!
Muted 100th birthday celebrations: So unshowy in life, so discreet in death, Elizabeth seemed to have tiptoed out of the collective memory, quietly shutting the door behind her. For some time after her death, when her subjects spoke of “the Queen”, they meant her. But gradually that changed. Nowadays, when they talk of the Queen they mean Camilla. Events held for the 100th anniversary of Elizabeth’s birth on Tuesday seemed curiously muted: a Palace reception for centenarians; a visit by the King to the British Museum to look at the design for her memorial.
QEII spoke about a potential Sussex divorce. Those who respected her privacy when she was alive are now happy to talk of the more interesting and forceful woman they remember. A year or two ago a well-respected figure in public life, a regular at the Palace, told me that during the Megxit period talk around the table had turned to the Harry and Meghan marriage, and if it would end in divorce. “It’s not a matter of if,” the Queen chipped in, “it’s a matter of when.”
QEII thought Donald Trump was rude. As I was writing my book A Voyage Around the Queen, I was told by someone who had sat next to her at lunch that she called President Trump “very rude”. My informant also said the Queen had suggested that Trump must have “some sort of arrangement” with his wife, Melania. Some doubted what I wrote, not least Donald Trump himself, who called me a sleazebag and a phony. “Totally false,” he told reporters. “In fact, I heard always the opposite. I heard I was her favorite president. She would say it to a lot of people, she said it to friends of mine that ‘President Trump was my favorite president’ … We had an unbelievable relationship.” Ahem. But recently, Barack Obama agreed Queen Elizabeth had been no fan of Trump: she was, he said, “baffled” by his rise. “Why is this person so close to running your country?” she asked Obama in 2016.
All of the lies about QEII sort of blend together at this point, because royal biographers continue to insist that QEII was not some dutiful granny, but really a sharp-tongued bigot with dangerously poor judgment. But this feels new, right? We’ve heard endless stories about QEII bitching about Harry & Meghan naming their daughter after her, or something something TIARA, but have we ever heard her prediction that the Sussexes would divorce? Personally, I think this is less about someone quoting QEII and more likely it’s just some well-heeled courtier projecting the belief and desire of everyone within the royal establishment: they all WANTED Harry and Meghan to divorce, and they tried to do anything and everything to make it happen. There are still commentators openly fantasizing about Harry abandoning his wife and children and marrying an “English rose.” What’s crazy is that all of the fussing over the Sussex marriage was likely a distraction for the actual trainwreck in plain view: the Wales marriage.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid.
