Thousands of Facebook users salute Prince Harry

By Jessica Allen - Tuesday, August 28, 2012 at 3:08 PM - 0 Comments

No matter the hot water Prince Harry gets into, people still love the third royal in line to the throne.

Not long after TMZ posted photos of a nude Harry in an exclusive Las Vegas hotel suite, a Facebook page appeared called “Support Prince Harry with a naked salute!” in collaboration with www.salute4harry.co.uk.

“If you have served, or are serving, in the military,” the page says in an invitation to its 16,000 members, “I want to see a naked salute in support of Prince Harry uploaded on this group.”

Thousands of photos and counting have appeared.

The site was recently opened to everyone, though its creators have a simple request: “Cover your crown jewels (and) tag yourself in your photo as proof of your support to the nations favourite royal!”

Prince Harry, who has kept out of the press since returning to London after the scandal broke Aug. 21, is expected to “attend select events” at the 2012 Paralympic Games in London, a representative of the royals told TMZ.

Events begin tomorrow.

Prince Philip released from hospital

By Scaachi Koul - Monday, August 20, 2012 at 8:37 AM - 0 Comments

Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, left Aberdeen Royal Infirmary Monday morning after spending five days in hospital for a bladder infection.

He shook hands with staff outside before getting into a car.

From CBC:

“The Duke was a very good patient,” said senior staff nurse Denise Webster, “and as he left the hospital he told staff to behave themselves and he said he was going back to enjoy the rest of his holiday.”

Prince Phillip taken to hospital

By Scaachi Koul - Wednesday, August 15, 2012 at 11:50 AM - 0 Comments

Prince Phillip has been admitted to Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, BBC News reports. The prince, who is 91, had been staying at Balmoral with the Queen.

This hospital visit comes two months after he was taken to hospital with a bladder infection in the days before the Diamond Jubilee concert in early June. He was also in the hospital over Christmas after an operation for a blocked heart artery.

No details on his condition were given, and he was last seen at public engagements in Cowes this week.

Update: Buckingham Palace officials are saying Prince Phillip was admitted to hospital due to a recurrence of the bladder infection he had earlier in the summer. They said it was likely he would stay for a few days for treatment.

How Diana damaged William

By Ken MacQueen - Wednesday, May 23, 2012 at 10:12 AM - 0 Comments

Tim Graham/Getty Images

On the day of the funeral of Diana, princess of Wales—a sunny Saturday in September 1997—there was one small item that broke a million hearts in a city, and a nation, already awash in grief. A bouquet of white freesias sat atop her coffin as it rode on a gun carriage to Westminster Abbey. Nestled in the flowers was an envelope with a single word—“MUMMY”—printed in a child’s hand. Walking behind were its authors, princes William, 15, and Harry, 12, accompanied by their father, Prince Charles, their grandfather, Prince Philip, and their embittered uncle, Charles Spencer, Diana’s brother. At the time, those of us covering the funeral, and millions more watching on London’s streets and on televisions around the world, wondered what these wounded young lads could possibly have said to make sense of the tragedy that befell their mother, and the circus of grief it spawned.

That note also touched a deep chord with Penny Junor, a veteran royal watcher and the author of the newly published Prince William: Born to be King, which manages to be both a sympathetic portrait of the future king and a controversial examination of an upbringing that was scarred by tumult, loss and Diana’s mental fragility. “I thought it was incredibly touching,” she said of the note. It was only through the wise intervention of Sandy Henney, Prince Charles’s press secretary at the time, that the boys’ farewell words to their mother were sealed in an envelope, protected from the reach of the hundreds of telephoto lenses lining the funeral route. “Their lives had been so intruded upon by the media,” Junor said in an interview with Maclean’s. “That would have been the end of their world if their little note to their mother had been picked up by those lenses.”

In fact, the privacy of William and Harry’s lives had been trammelled from birth. Long before their mother’s death, they endured the loss of loved ones who fell out of favour with their parents, and the rage, tears and public humiliation of the marriage breakup that left them caught between the warring camps of mother and father. “He would be superhuman if he didn’t have demons,” Junor writes of William. “But he keeps them to himself; he is one of the most intensely private people you could meet.”

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Three amigos, house of Windsor edition

By Patricia Treble - Tuesday, February 28, 2012 at 3:48 PM - 0 Comments

Camilla and Kate en route to the Horse Guards Parade, Akira Suemori/AP

It may have only been a small notice in the Court Circular, a record of all duties by Britain’s royal family, but it caused editors and photographers to block off the date on their calendars, for it has the making of a photo-op unlike any other in recent royal history; on March 1, the Queen, Camilla, duchess of Cornwall and Kate, duchess of Cambridge will visit Fortnum & Mason, one of London’s most exclusive department stores, where the Queen will unveil a plaque marking the regeneration of Piccadilly.

So three generations of Windsors, aged respectively 85, 64 and 30, will be out and about together. And given Fortnum and Mason has a fabulous restaurant, there is speculation that they will have tea; an historic tea for a Queen and two future queens. Continue…

The disappearing Duchess

By Patricia Treble - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 14 Comments

Danny Martindale/FilmMagic/Getty Images

William and Kate’s appearance last Thursday at the Royal Marsden hospital was the most ordinary of royal engagements. The duke and duchess of Cambridge opened a new children’s cancer centre. It’s the sort of duty that royalty undertake every day. Yet the visit was accorded superstar treatment by the world’s media, largely because it was just the second public engagement for the couple since completing their tour of Canada and America on July 10.

So an event that lasted a few hours generated stories well past the weekend—he’d pulled a 24-hour shift as a search and rescue pilot in Wales before rushing to the Surrey hospital, her engagement ring vanished during the visit! (She’d removed it and washed her hands before meeting patients with low immunity.) WhatKateWore.com, a site devoted to Kate’s fashion, saw its visitors on Thursday jump from an average of 8,000 a day to more than 20,000.

While gossips postulate Kate’s seclusion is because she’s either pregnant with twins or depressed because she’s too thin to conceive, the reason is more prosaic: it’s a long-term strategy by the royal household to ease her into a life of duty and unceasing attention by a curious world. Earlier this year, Judy Wade, the royal editor of Hello!, said, “We were told she’s not going to do much in the way of official engagements at all in the first few years because they want the marriage to work and they want her to have a gentle introduction into royal life.” (The recent royal tour is seen as a one-off variation from that plan.)

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REVIEW: Young Prince Philip: His Turbulent Early Life

By Patricia Treble - Thursday, August 18, 2011 at 8:45 AM - 0 Comments

The Queen’s irascible 90-year-old husband may have been born a prince, but, as this new biography shows, he had a childhood so full of trauma and upheaval it’s amazing he emerged a self-contained, self-confident (if brusque) man. Philip of Greece was born in 1921 to Princess Alice of Battenberg, the deaf great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, and Prince Andrea of Greece, son of George I, a Danish prince elected king of the Hellenes in 1863 by the Greek assembly. His parents were closely related to most of Europe’s then-teetering royal houses. In 1922 the family was exiled after Andrea was blamed for a Greek military disaster and nearly executed. They settled in Paris but, with little money, depended on relatives.

Eade’s exhaustive research shows that while there were holidays spent in the palatial piles of his extended family, all was not well at home. By 1929, his mother was showing signs of mental illness. Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, she was soon institutionalized, and out of her son’s life for years at a time. During the next 18 months, all four of Philip’s sisters married German princes. (His sister Cecile died in a 1937 plane crash with most of her family.) Andrea decamped to the French Riviera to waste the rest of his life. Apart from vacations with relatives, Philip was alone, packed off to boarding school, including Kurt Hahn’s tough, spartan school in Salem, Germany, which was founded by Philip’s brother-in-law’s family, the Badens. As Germany Nazified, the Jewish headmaster fled to Britain. Philip followed the next year.

While the second half of the book is interesting—it revolves around Philip’s wartime experiences as a Royal Navy officer, his serious romances, including one with Osla Benning, a Canadian-born debutante living in London, as well as his first years as a royal consort—it is Eade’s dissection of Philip’s younger years that makes this a standout royal biography. As for the duke of Edinburgh himself, he’s never been one for self-pity: “I just had to get on with it. You do. One does.”

The royal pecking order

By Patricia Treble - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 3:00 PM - 0 Comments

Reuters; Getty Images

Just before the wedding starts, the royal family will arrive at Westminster Abbey. As they always do at such glittering events, members of the house of Windsor will automatically recreate the line of succession in reverse for the long walk to their grade-A seats. The supporting cast of lesser royals—the Kents and the Gloucesters and children of the late Princess Margaret—go first followed by the Queen’s immediate family, also in backwards order of importance—Anne, Edward, Andrew and Charles with their spouses and children. Elizabeth II, with Prince Philip, takes the best spot, at the end. “The star of the show comes last,” explains Brian Hoey, an author with an encyclopedic knowledge of royal protocol. Once the service is over, the family leaves, this time with the Queen in the lead with everyone else following.

Precedence is a carefully observed royal rite that can be a minefield for the uninitiated. And part of the confusion is of the Queen’s making. In 2005, Charles married Camilla Parker Bowles, which automatically placed his former mistress, now wife of the heir to the throne, ahead of all other royal women except the Queen on the royal pecking order. “Technically, the other ladies below [Camilla], when she’s with her husband, should curtsy to her,” Hoey explained. Courtiers reported that the two senior princesses, Anne and Alexandra of Kent, the Queen’s cousin, staged a mini revolt. “Anne? She is never going to curtsy to her,” Hoey said. “That’s not going to happen.”

To calm the waters, the Queen changed an internal household document called “Precedence of the Royal Family to be Observed at Court.” While male precedence remained that of the line of succession, the ladies’ rules were upended to put those born royal ahead of Charles’s wife. Now, when Camilla attends communal royal events with her husband, she gets the customary No. 2 spot, behind the Queen. But if she’s solo, then the female rules kick in and she plummets to No. 6, behind Anne, then Beatrice and Eugenie—daughters of Andrew, duke of York—and next Alexandra of Kent.

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Monaco's royal pains

By Patricia Treble - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 at 10:28 AM - 2 Comments

Lionel Cironneau/AP

Wearing a sleek black Speedo suit, her long blond hair tucked into an orange cap, Charlene Wittstock strode out of the water in Kwazulu Natal, South Africa, on Feb. 12, looking more like the competitive swimmer she used to be than the royal bride she is. She’d just completed the Midmar Mile, a massive open-water swim, and helped raise $80,000 for the Special Olympics. In July, the statuesque South African beauty marries Monaco’s reigning prince, Albert II, and becomes his princess consort. Monaco hasn’t had a princess consort in almost 20 years, since Albert’s mother, Princess Grace, died in 1982. Like Grace, an American who gave up an Oscar-winning acting career upon her marriage to Prince Rainier, Wittstock, 33, is an English-speaking outsider to the tiny, ultra-exclusive Mediterranean playground for the rich and famous.

She’s also scandal-free, something that certainly does not apply to her 52-year-old groom or his sisters Caroline and Stephanie. For decades the Grimaldi family has hit the headlines with trashy tales of wildly unsuitable lovers, broken marriages and brawls. Indeed, illegitimacy and shotgun weddings are almost de rigueur: of the three siblings’ nine children, five were born out of wedlock while two others arrived less than nine months after their parents’ nuptials. Their shenanigans make those of Queen Elizabeth II’s four children look positively tame: while three first marriages of the Windsor kids broke down spectacularly, currently Charles and Anne have second spouses and Edward is still with his original wife, while Andrew never remarried. And certainly no illegitimate children have appeared.

In contrast, Albert, a lifelong bachelor, confessed, mere weeks after his father died in 2005 and he’d assumed power, that he’d fathered a boy, Alexandre, then three, with a Togolese flight attendant. The revelation at least put to rest the rumours that he was gay, which had dogged him for years. He hinted on French TV that there were other progeny. “I know there are other people who are in more or less the same situation. We will give them an answer at the appropriate time.” Then, in 2006, he acknowledged his 14-year-old daughter, Jazmin Grace, the result of a vacation fling in 1991 with a married Californian, Tamara Rotolo. Neither illegitimate child can inherit the throne. The revelations only put Albert on par with his headline-grabbing sisters.

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An off day for a royal wedding?

By macleans.ca - Thursday, January 13, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 2 Comments

Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Atlantic Canada: Despite having a higher than average interest in the British royal family, compared to most Canadians, Atlantic Canadians are the least likely to agree (19 per cent) that the April 29 wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton is worthy of a national holiday. On average, 27 per cent of Canadians think they should get the day off to celebrate.

Quebec: Nearly every Canadian (98 per cent) believes that drinking and driving is “unacceptable.” But in the past year, nearly one in four people drove a car at least once despite believing their blood-alcohol level was close to, or above, the legal limit (28 per cent said they drove after having one drink). Four per cent of Quebecers said they got behind the wheel “fairly often” when their levels were above or close to the legal limit.

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Who wants to be a princess?

By Leah McLaren - Tuesday, January 11, 2011 at 9:20 AM - 2 Comments

Will that be all, your majesty? 'It's not about trappings, but what’s inside,' says one royal watcher | Rudi Froese/Anzenberger/Redux

Miss Jerramy Fine, 33, royal watcher and American expat, is sitting at the kitchen table of her well-appointed Chiswick flat, explaining the difference between a real princess and the fairy-tale kind.

“Disney princesses aren’t bad, but they generally suggest frilly ball gowns and horse-drawn coaches, whereas the real ones—whether it’s the princesses of Denmark, Norway, Spain, Sweden or England—are more about duty and manners and philanthropy,” she says, taking a sip of tea and smiling serenely beneath her crown of glossy blond curls. “And what brings both varieties together is kindness.”

Fine is the author of the 2008 memoir Someday My Prince Will Come, which chronicles her journey from reluctant child of western Colorado hippies (she was forced to wear tie-dyed hemp fibre and given the traumatizing middle name Sage) to fervent adolescent anglophile and eventual transplant to London, England—where, in her 20s, she attended the London School of Economics, interned at the House of Commons, and secretly schemed to meet and marry a prince.

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They're golden

By Anne Kingston - Thursday, December 9, 2010 at 9:40 AM - 0 Comments

Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP

On Nov. 16, 2010, the world’s longest job interview came to an end: Prince William and Kate Middleton finally announced their decision to wed. In a televised sit-down with her fiancé, Middleton, the first commoner to marry into the British monarchy in 350 years, said she was “shocked” when the prince popped the question in October during a holiday in Kenya.

That would make one of us. The couple, both 28, met in 2001 at the University of St. Andrews; since 2006, when it was announced   Middleton would have her own security detail, there has been fervid “when-will-they-wed?” speculation. Throughout, Middleton, or “Waity Katie” as she was dubbed by the British press, displayed poise, discretion, loyalty, and a decided absence of personal ambition—all traits that will serve her well in her new job. Certainly there’s pressure on this union to succeed, especially after William’s parents’ scorched-earth divorce. Even the most staunch monarchists agree the royal family can’t survive another marital meltdown. Thus the prince doesn’t need to make a love match as much as a dynastic consolidation. Palace advisers are reported to be acclimatizing Middleton for life in the fishbowl, offering instructional videos so she can study Diana’s technique.

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The ring's cycle

By Stephanie Findlay - Thursday, November 25, 2010 at 3:00 PM - 1 Comment

Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP; David Levinson/Corbis

On Friday, Feb. 6, 1981, on the grounds of Windsor Castle, Prince Charles proposed to Diana—sans ring. It came two weeks later on Feb. 22, when he and Diana were having an intimate evening with the Queen. Diana described being presented with a choice of potential gems in Andrew Morton’s 1992 book Diana: Her True Story. “A briefcase comes along on the pretext that Andrew is getting a signet ring for his 21st birthday and along come these sapphires. I mean nuggets! I suppose I chose it, we all chipped in. The Queen paid for it.”

The ring in question was a large oval sapphire surrounded by 14 round diamonds and set in 18-karat white gold, worth $67,000 and made by jeweller Garrard & Co., the official crown jewellers at the time.

Just two days later, on Feb. 24, following a private lunch with the Queen, Lady Diana Spencer and Charles officially announced their engagement. On the grounds of Buckingham Palace, the future princess of Wales posed for photographers awkwardly, placing her hand across her body assuming an uncomfortable, defensive position. Tina Brown, author of The Diana Chronicles, wrote that her department-store outfit, picked days before off a rack at Harrods, was “air-stewardess blue with a matronly print blouse tied by a large pussycat bow that made her look like a zaftig Sloane on the frontispiece of Country Life.”

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PHOTOS: The pageantry of the past

By macleans.ca - Thursday, November 25, 2010 at 2:00 PM - 1 Comment

Prince William to marry Kate Middleton

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 at 5:59 PM - 7 Comments

Waity Katie will wait no more. Prince William, who will be Prince of Wales if Charles ever gets a shot at the throne, announced on Tuesday his engagement to longtime girlfriend Kate Middleton. No date has been announced yet for the wedding, though it will take place in spring or summer of 2011. William and Kate have been “on again and off again” for the last eight years; both are twenty-eight years old.

For more on Prince William’s engagement to Kate Middleton, pick up this week’s special issue of Maclean’s, on newsstands Nov. 18.

TIMELINE: Prince William’s 9-year courtship of Kate Middleton From their university days to their engagement	PHOTO GALLERY: Prince William and Kate Middleton’s road to engagement A look at the soon-to-be royal pair over the course of their relationship	PHOTO GALLERY: Will Prince William and Kate Middleton top these royal weddings? A look back at the most memorable royal nuptials

TIMELINE: Prince William’s 9-year courtship of Kate Middleton

By Josh Dehaas - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 at 5:33 PM - 16 Comments

September 2001: Prince William and Kate Middleton meet at St. Andrew’s University, where they’re both studying art history. William learns art isn’t his strength. Kate convinces him to stay in school after he “wobbles,” but he switches to geography.

February 2002: William reportedly pays £200 for a front row seat to a cheeky charity fashion show at which Kate walks the runway wearing little more than underwear.

September 2002: The pair moves into student housing together, along with two friends. Rumours of their relationship emerge, though Kate is still dating someone else.

June 2003: Rumours swirl that William is dating the heiress of wealthy family in Kenya, but it’s Kate who attends his 21st birthday party at Windsor Castle. Prince Charles tells the media that, to his knowledge, his son is single.

December 2003: Kate splits from her boyfriend. Continue…

The Queen's man on the ground

By Patricia Treble - Thursday, July 8, 2010 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

Chris Jackson/GETTY IMAGES

The driving rain that greeted the Queen in Halifax on June 28, at the start of her nine-day visit to Canada, subsided, as if by royal fiat, into a light mist for the welcoming ceremony at Garrison Grounds. Elizabeth II wore a practical raincoat and carried a yellow-trimmed umbrella that perfectly matched her hat, but otherwise she and Prince Philip more or less ignored the inclement weather as they toured a Mi’kmaq cultural village on the Halifax Common to mark the 400th anniversary of the baptism of grand chief Henri Membertou, the first native baptized in Canada. All eyes were on the pair as they gamely strolled through the soggy park. The crowds likely didn’t even notice the grey-haired man trailing a few paces behind: Kevin MacLeod, the lively Cape Bretoner who is the Canadian secretary to the Queen and who has helped to orchestrate her visits here since 1987.

Royal tours are studies in strategic planning. This one, the Queen’s 22nd as monarch, has been more than a year in the making. Stephen Harper first floated the idea during an audience with the Queen at last year’s G20 summit in London. Soon after, MacLeod and the Department of Canadian Heritage began fleshing out details, starting with creating an official theme: to honour “the Canadian record of service—past, present and future.”

Mere regal presence no longer constitutes a theme, MacLeod says. “We’re well beyond the days when a tour just involved cutting ribbons and receiving flowers.” Today, it must “carry a very strong message of relevancy.”

Thus, in keeping with the record-of-service theme, the sovereign reviewed an international fleet in Halifax to mark the 100th anniversary of the navy. And that evening she and Philip met local heroes of the unsung variety, the kind of people whose quiet efforts bind communities, yet rarely generate notice.

Speaking of unsung heroes, the credit for such graceful touches goes to the Canadian secretary. As the conduit between the palace, the Prime Minister’s Office and the provinces, he oversees every detail of the visit’s program. “We work closely with the RCMP, the Department of National Defence, Public Works, Health Canada, Transport Canada,” MacLeod says. “The size of the team that is required to deliver a royal visit is quite massive.”

But his role is central. He’s the guy who drafts the Queen’s speeches (she’s delivering four) and makes at least two trips to each site she’ll visit. Walk-throughs are incredibly—some might say mind-numbingly—detailed: “When elevators are taken, how many? Who’s in elevator A, B and C?” Yet MacLeod still sounds positively jaunty, even after weathering an official walk-through with the British delegation in April and subsequent weeks of “fine tuning, fine tuning, fine tuning.”

As recently as the week before the tour began, he was fielding about 30 emails a day from Buckingham Palace, nailing down minutiae so that every element of each day’s program could be recorded in a little book called the “Daily Sheets,” which he and other officials are carrying everywhere this week.

Nothing is left to chance, especially protocol. The Queen isn’t here as the British sovereign but as the Canadian head of state, so she departed Heathrow on a Canadian Forces jet. And, MacLeod explains, when the plane crosses into our airspace, “the Canadian secretary and police officer take over from their British counterparts.” Attention to detail is never-ending: although flowers given to the Queen are donated to local nursing homes and hospitals, he says, “If there are cards attached with text, she reads them. If there is a name and address, they’ll get a letter of thanks.”

It is too early to talk of a visit in 2012, when she celebrates 60 years on the throne, though the Queen herself raised hopes when she concluded her first speech: “It is very good to be home.” MacLeod, who chairs Canada’s Diamond Jubilee committee on top of his other job as the Senate’s usher of the Black Rod, points out that she will be 86 then, three years shy of the queen mother’s age when she undertook her final visit to Canada. “The genes are very similar,” he says. “We live in hope.”

Who will wear the crown in Canada?

By Brian Bethune with Patricia Treble - Thursday, July 1, 2010 at 11:40 AM - 16 Comments

Luke MacGregor/PA Wire/Press Association Images

As the Queen of Canada gets older and every visit to her senior dominion becomes closer to being her last, the latent flow of Canadian anti-monarchical thought bubbles to the surface. We are not fully grown up, not a real country runs the main current, so long as a foreign monarch sits on our throne, or any monarch at all, say the more militant republicans among us. Most of this grousing, which tends to rise with incidents of dysfunctionality—or embarrassing normality, depending on your view of human nature—among the lesser royals (or even ex-royals: see Sarah Ferguson), completely ignores the fact that the monarchy is sunk deep, not only in the country’s fabric, but in the effectively untouchable part of the Constitution.

Replacing the monarchy would require the unanimous agreement of Parliament and all 10 provinces. Last time we tried anything like that, we ended up with the creaky travesty of the Charlottetown accord—a grab-all that included every interest-group demand short of bus passes for seniors—which was mercifully euthanized by Canadians in a 1992 referendum. In other words, any sensible politician would rather open his veins than open constitutional talks.

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Crowning glory | Photo Gallery

By macleans.ca - Thursday, July 1, 2010 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

‘I am not a fair-weather friend’ | Royal Tour 2010

By Patricia Treble - Thursday, July 1, 2010 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

Getty Images/ Reuters

They might not live in Canada, but the royal family sure visit a lot. They’ve come alone, with spouses and sometimes with kids. When Princess Anne competed at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, her husband, three brothers and her parents came to support her. It is the only time the entire royal family has been abroad in one place. The most frequent visitor is Prince Philip, who has crossed the Atlantic 43 times, including 22 times with his wife, Elizabeth (not counting their upcoming tour).

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Highlights of the regal tour

By macleans.ca - Thursday, July 1, 2010 at 10:40 AM - 0 Comments

ADRIAN DENNIS/afp/Getty Images

Monday, June 28 • Halifax
3:00 p.m. Official arrival, Garrison
Grounds
3:55 p.m. Mi’kmaq cultural event, Halifax Common

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The queen by the numbers

By Patricia Treble - Thursday, July 1, 2010 at 10:40 AM - 0 Comments

Getty Images/ NATIONAL CURRENCY COLLECTION

0: Number of passports held by the Queen. She has none because passports are issued by the government in her name.
2.23: Weight, in kilograms, of St. Edward’s Crown (c. 1661) worn by Elizabeth II at her coronation in 1953.

5: Number of versions of the Queen’s portrait on Canadian banknotes (1935, 1954, 1969, 1986 and 2004).

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The Royals: An extraordinary marriage

By Ken MacQueen and Patricia Treble - Tuesday, June 29, 2010 at 9:22 AM - 20 Comments

Anwar Hussein/Getty Images

At the end of one of the royal couple’s many trips to Canada, a well-meaning if unimaginative official asked Prince Philip, duke of Edinburgh: “How was your flight?” It’s the kind of mindless chat that drives the Queen’s hubby to distraction. “Have you flown in a plane,” he asked the hapless official. “Yes? Well, it was just like that.” Queen Elizabeth II, his wife of 62 years, would never be so cutting. One has to wonder, though, after 58 years on the throne, some 375 functions a year and visits to 132 nations, give or take, if the 84-year-old monarch isn’t tempted at times to let fly a zinger or two.

Inevitably, when she and Philip arrive in Halifax on June 28 for this, her 22nd official Canadian tour as Queen, someone will inquire about her journey. And over the nine days of the visit—which also include stops in Ottawa, Winnipeg, Toronto and Waterloo, Ont.—many more will comment on the weather or her hat, and inquire about her grandchildren or the corgis. To all these she’ll offer replies so sweet and innocuous that hovering reporters will shut their notebooks in despair.

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The Royals: Just grin and bear it

By Patricia Treble - Monday, June 28, 2010 at 1:48 PM - 9 Comments

DAVE BUSTON/AP

The nightmare for royal tour organizers is how easily months of exquisitely precise planning can unravel, especially when obvious problems aren’t foreseen. On their 2002 Canadian visit, Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip went to an outdoor event. In October. In the coldest big city in the world—Winnipeg. Beside the Red River. Naturally, the temperature plunged to just above freezing.

The royal couple was seated on an exposed platform without so much as a lap rug to keep them from shivering in the wind as they listened to the droning tones of politicians. To add insult to injury, their boat conked out on the Red River and had to be towed to the other shore. “That was interesting,” Elizabeth II said to Gary Doer, then premier. The Times of London translated that queenspeak into “I am not in the least amused.” After that frigid adventure, the monarch decided not to rely on the foresight of tour organizers. At that evening’s event—again outdoors—she wrapped herself in a thick mink coat.

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