The other love story

David and Rupert Hartley/Rex Features/CP

Few remember it, but it was an instant that captured the whole story. It happened at Buckingham Palace after the 1986 wedding of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson—a great beginning to a sad union. William, four years old and dressed as a 19th-century sailor for the occasion, had run after the newlyweds, tottering dangerously close to their carriage’s big rear wheels. Then the Queen spotted him and scrambled after her grandson, running for several metres before pulling him back. “It was an incredible sight,” one palace employee later said. “Many of us have worked here for years and we have never seen the Queen run before.”

In the tightly scripted world of the British royals, such rare unstudied moments—a brief sprint to collect a beloved boy in danger—are all we have to go on. Everything else lies rich and hidden. And so it is with that most private of relationships, the one between William and Elizabeth II—the second in line to the throne and the Queen herself. The pair are said to be close, yet we have just the slightest of hints to suggest that that’s the case: unlike the pyrotechnics of his mother Diana, princess of Wales, William has somehow managed to lead a life largely sheltered from the prying eyes of the press, and the Queen is a study in circumspection.

Although it’s often Diana who’s cited as the main proponent behind giving William and his younger brother Harry as normal a childhood as possible—lunches at McDonald’s, visits to Disney World—the Queen also encouraged the boys to behave as normal boys do, but in her own way: against the rustic backdrop of her beloved Balmoral Castle, in rugged northeastern Scotland. There, William was free to explore the private 20,000-hectare estate and, under his gruff grandfather’s tutorship, learn to fish for salmon.

When William was 13 years old, he left his parents’ apartments at Kensington Palace to begin at Eton, the prestigious boys school a short walk from Windsor Castle—his grandmother’s favourite residence—that’s educated 19 British prime ministers. Every second Sunday or so, after chapel, the prince would make the 20-minute walk to see his grandmother, telling his Eton fellows he was “off to the WC”—a pun on the British “water closet,” or washroom.

That toilet humour may well have been used to deflect attention from William’s deepening relationship with the Queen, to whom this new proximity suddenly allowed sessions of tea and conversation. Actually, they were the informal beginnings of William’s princely education—where Prince Philip schooled him in the finer points of fishing, the Queen stressed the art of reigning as a constitutional monarch. “Apart from socializing with his grandmother, she’s also given him some very subtle lessons in geography—the countries over which he’ll be one day reigning, hopefully, and all constitutional history,” says royal biographer Brian Hoey. Indeed, his growing closeness to her provided the Queen with the opportunity of moulding William into a link between the royal traditions that she represents—of duty, responsibility and pomp—and the more modern, populist leanings of the mother he so resembles.

“Thank goodness he hasn’t got ears like his father,” the Queen is supposed to have said after first seeing the infant William, a day after his birth—just one of many small indications that the Queen recognizes Diana’s imprint on the boy. The Queen early on knew Diana’s influence extended not just to matters physical, but also to William’s sensitivity and occasional inclination to stubbornness. Out of this raw stuff, the Queen has shaped her grandson into a future monarch with a grand vision of how a king should live—to maintain perspective and stay above the fray.

Nowhere was that personal education more in evidence than in the days following the death of Diana in August 1997. That morning, the Queen informed prime minister Tony Blair that no member of the royal family would speak publicly on the tragedy. Diana’s boys would remain under her protection outside the public eye at Balmoral. “Caught between the private and the public, the Queen’s response was to fall back on what had always been her defence in times of stress: routine and protocol,” writes Ben Pimlott in The Queen.

Yet Windsor tradition gave no guidance in the case of Diana, whose divorce from Charles a year earlier left her status uncertain. At Balmoral, the flags stayed at full mast; the masts were altogether flagless at Buckingham Palace (custom says the sovereign’s standard flies only when she’s in residence). Public reaction was swift. Writes the Mail on Sunday’s royal correspondent, Katie Nicholl, of the Queen’s move to shelter and comfort the boys and shun the public: “It was the first time in her reign that she put her family before duty and it cost her dearly.”