This was nothing, however, when compared to Ms James’s verdict on William, standing to attention behind his wife with a ‘fig leaf hand clasp’ shielding his trouser crotch, in her opinion, and a ‘raised chin pose that a policeman might adopt before collaring a suspect’.
A few Internet commentators agreed. ‘William looks like he would rather be elsewhere,’ tweeted one, with another ‘royal fan’ responding, ‘William should have a much bigger smile on his face.’
Oh, the lot of a future king! Was this the captious and carping destiny for which Prince William, second in line to the throne, had been working for over twenty years since his visits to Windsor Castle for lunch with his grandmother the Queen in the late 1990s? Aged thirteen in the autumn of 1995, the prince had just started school at Eton College, the exclusive all-male academy (founded 1440) across the Thames from Windsor.
It was then three years after his parents’ separation – just two years before Diana’s death – and the Queen was worried about her grandson’s state of mind. Was Charles too wrapped up in his own concerns to be a proper father, with that Camilla Parker Bowles and everything else in the picture? While Diana, of course, with her motley succession of largely foreign boyfriends, was deliberately acting as a subversive anti-royal ‘flake’. The Queen actually feared that the boy might be heading for some sort of breakdown, she confided to one of her advisors – just as the prince’s mother herself had clearly cracked up mentally in several respects.
The Duke of Edinburgh intervened. Philip shared his wife’s concerns and he suggested that she overcome her longstanding aversion to involvement in messy family matters by trying to get closer to this particular boy – who was not just her fragile grandson, but a future inheritor of her crown. Perhaps the lad could come up and join them both in the castle from time to time on a Sunday, when the Eton boys were allowed out into the town?
And so the lunches had begun. Every few Sundays – allowing for the weekends that William would spend with his separated mother or father – the teenager would walk along Eton High Street with his detective, and across the bridge up to Windsor, where he would join the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh for a hearty and tasty meal.
Pudding ended, Philip would make a discreet exit, leaving his wife and grandson together in the panelled Oak Room with its six-arm chandelier hanging over the table in front of Queen Victoria’s beautiful Gobelins tapestry of The Hunt. In this splendid and historic but also intimate setting, grandmother and grandson – monarch and future heir – would get down to brass tacks, talking and ‘sharing’ as only the pair of them could.
‘There’s a serenity about her,’ William revealed ten years later, talking to the Queen’s 2011 biographer Robert Hardman, and explaining how his grandmother had encouraged him to stay calm in the face of all that the world would throw at him one day. ‘I think if you are of an age, you have a pretty old-fashioned faith, you do your best every day and say your prayers every night. Well, if you’re criticised for it, you’re not going to get much better whatever you do. What’s the point of worrying?’
It was during these conversations in the Oak Room that Prince William learned from his grandmother how the institution of the crown was something to be upheld and respected, and how one might have to fight – he might have to become quite tough, in fact – in order to preserve it. It was William’s birthright and legacy, after all, as much as his gran’s. The prince was particularly impressed by the stories that his grandmother would tell him about her own early years on the throne – how she had had to step in to succeed her father King George VI in 1952, at the age of only twenty-five, to tackle a job that many men in those days believed they could do better.
‘It must have been very daunting,’ he said to Hardman. ‘And I think how loads of twenty-five-year-olds – myself, my brother and lots of people included – didn’t have anything like that. And we didn’t have the extra pressure put on us at that age. It’s amazing that she didn’t crack. She just carried on and kept going. And that’s the thing about her. You present a challenge in front of her and she’ll climb it. And I think that to be doing that for sixty years – it’s incredible.’
Talking to the BBC in 2005, as he neared the end of his studies at St Andrews University, William would again pay tribute to the personal support and advice that his grandmother gave him.
‘She’s just very helpful on any sort of difficulties or problems I might be having,’ he said. ‘She’s been brilliant, she’s a real role model.’
It was in the Oak Room conversations that William would have heard of warming pans and the Glorious Revolution, along with the role that the armed services would have to play in his future. Then there was the importance of the Church of England in his responsibilities as monarch – though none of this was presented to him in any formal, lecturing sort of way.
‘I don’t think she believes too heavily in instruction,’ he said in 2016, expanding to the BBC on the subject of the Queen’s personal style and input, which he described as ‘more of a soft, influencing, modest kind of guidance’.
The Queen herself had received formal constitutional history lessons. In a curious mirror image of William, the young Princess Elizabeth used to walk
