Month: July 2024

Queen Elizabeth II was so frail in her final days she found it difficult even lifting a teapot, according to a royal biographer.

The death of Her Late Majesty at the age of 96 in September 2022 sparked an outpouring of grief in the UK and tributes from around the world.

But in the preceding months she is said to have begun to feel increasingly isolated in the wake of beloved husband Prince Philip’s death, as well as the passing of other very close friends.

The Queen reportedly took to inviting old members of household staff into her private apartments to reminisce about good times in the past.

In his new book ‘Catherine, the Princess of Wales: The Biography’, Robert Jobson recounts a heart-breaking revelation from one former staff member.

‘She told me she didn’t know anybody [her staff and servants] anymore,’ he writes.

Regular visits and phone calls from her grandson Prince William were said to be her highlights, the Daily Mail reports.

He and wife Kate moved to the four-bedroom Adelaide Cottage on the Windsor Castle estate to be close to his grandmother in her final months.

Quoting one aide, Jobson writes: ‘He knew his time with his grandmother was precious and he is delighted they, as a couple, made that decision.’

The royal biographer also describes how the Queen’s final appearance on the Buckingham Palace balcony – when she thrilled the thousands gathered outside for her Platinum Jubilee celebrations – took a great deal of courage as she was in constant pain throughout.

As the monarch’s health deteriorated, he writes, she ‘could hardly see and just didn’t have the strength’.

One source close to the Queen said: ‘She would get terribly frustrated as she hated causing a mess, pouring it over the tray.

‘She asked for a smaller pot and would get frustrated when the staff forgot and brought the big one.’

Jobson, who has penned biographies of other royals including King Charles, says the Queen was comforted knowing the institution was safe for the next two generations.

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The Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s former home, Frogmore Cottage, has remained empty more than a year after they officially vacated the property.

Palace officials at the annual Sovereign Grant briefing said there were no new tenants in the Grade II Crown Estate property in Windsor Home Park.

It comes after it was revealed that Harry stayed in hotels on recent visits to the UK, rather than at a royal residence.

The Sussexes were asked to move any remaining possessions out of their UK home close to Windsor Castle in 2023, just weeks after the duke criticised his family in his controversial memoir Spare.

A Palace official said: ‘During the year, Frogmore Cottage has remained empty.

‘I don’t think, at this point, I would speculate on who will be the future occupants of the cottage.’

He added: ‘The Sovereign Grant has been fully reimbursed for the refurbishment costs of Frogmore cottage when it was initially provided to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and, therefore, there is no cost to the Sovereign Grant other than some routine maintenance, but it would be required for any of the buildings.’

In 2019, royal accounts showed Harry and Meghan paid £2.4 million to cover the cottage’s refurbishment and rental.

Frogmore was a gift to the Sussexes from the late Queen, but after moving there after the birth of Prince Archie they relocated to the US, only using the property a handful of times afterwards.

It was previously reported the disgraced Duke of York was offered the much smaller Frogmore Cottage in a bid to relocate him from the larger Royal Lodge.

But Andrew was said to have signed a 75-year lease on the Royal Lodge mansion in 2003.

The disgraced prince is understood to be presently living at the property with his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson.

Rumours have even been swirling that Prince William may at one point have been eyeing the mansion for his own family. 

A friend of Charles previously said: ‘Unfortunately, if Andrew refuses to leave within a reasonable time frame, then the King may be forced to reassess the whole package of support he provides.

‘And the duke would be required to fund the lion’s share of his security, accommodation and lifestyle costs all on his own – which, given the sums involved, is highly unlikely to be possible in the long term.’

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As King Charles prepares to deliver the first King’s speech of the new parliament, it’s only natural to be curious about the crowns he wears.

The King wore St Edward’s Crown to his coronation but will wear the Imperial State Crown when delivering the speech later today.

The Imperial State Crown will be a familiar sight to some, as it held a prominent place on the coffin of Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II during her September 2022 funeral.

The purple, gem-encrusted crown is undeniably one of the most famous pieces in the Crown Jewels, so many are fascinated by its origins.

Here’s all you need to know about the crown and its role in state affairs.

What is the Imperial State Crown?

The Imperial State Crown was originally made for the coronation of George IV in 1937.

It was made by jewellers Garrard & Company using jewels that have hundreds of years of royal history – including a sapphire belonging to Edward the Confessor in 1066.

The crown was worn by Queen Elizabeth II after her coronation in 1953.

The late monarch wore the rather heavy St Edward’s Crown – another of the Crown Jewels, dating back to 1661 – during the coronation, with the Imperial State Crown chosen for the subsequent photography and Palace balcony appearance, as it was lighter.

The Imperial State Crown is present at every State Opening of Parliament and is worn by the monarch each year.

Even on occasions when the late Queen could not wear it at the State Opening, it was still present at the event.

Her Late Majesty once said of the crown to the BBC: ‘You see, it’s much smaller isn’t it? It would have been up to about there when my father wore it’ – pointing to the top of diamond-encrusted orb on top.

The late Queen also called the crown ‘very unwieldy’, quipping: ‘Fortunately, my father and I had the same sort of shaped head, but once you put it on it stays. It just reigns itself.’

Though it is lighter than St Edward’s Crown, the Imperial State Crown is still fairly heavy – at close to 3lbs in weight.

The late Queen added that it ‘would break your neck’ if you tried to look down at a speech while wearing it.

That said, its weight is unsurprising, given that the piece is made of an openwork gold frame and velvet cap, plus thousands of precious gemstones.

What jewels are in the crown?

These precious jewels include:

• 2,868 diamonds
• The 317.4 carat Cullinan II diamond
• 269 pearls, including four large hanging pearls that belonged to Queen Elizabeth I
• 17 sapphires
• 11 emeralds
• Four rubies

Among them is the Black Prince’s Ruby, set into the cross, which is possibly a spinel (a semi-precious stone).

The stone dates to 1367, when legend would have it was given to the Edward the Black Prince, son of King Edward III, by Pedro the Cruel, the King of Castile, who took the ruby from a Muslim king of Granada.

King Henry V is said to have worn the same ruby set in his helmet at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415.

The large diamond at the front of the crown is the 371.4 carat Cullinan II Diamond.

This is the second largest stone cut from the 3,106 carat Cullinan Diamond, an extraordinarily extravagant gift given to Edward VII on his 66th birthday in 1907 by the government of Transvaal to mark the good relations between England and South Africa.

In 1910, Cullinan I, the remainder of the epic Cullinan Diamond, was put into the Sovereign’s Sceptre, which was placed along with the Orb on the late Queen’s coffin when it arrived at Westminster Hall.

The Imperial State Crown also contains St Edward’s Sapphire, said to be from the ring of King Edward the Confessor dating to 1066 – found when his coffin was moved from one part of Westminster Abbey to another shrine in the 12th century.

Pearl earrings hanging in the crown’s centre are believed to be Scottish, once worn by Mary, Queen of Scots.

The Stuart Sapphire at the back of the crown is thought to have belonged to King Charles I, brought to the country by his son James II and has been adorning state crowns since 1838.

How much is the Imperial State Crown worth?

That’s a lot of gemstones – but the Imperial State Crown doesn’t have an exact value attached to it.

Along with other Crown Jewels the Imperial Orb and Imperial Sceptre, the Imperial State Crown has never been appraised.

Some experts estimate the value of the crown at an eye-watering £3 billion to £5 billion.

If you’re interest in jewels, take a look inside the late Queen’s vast personal jewellery collection here.

How often does King Charles wear the crown?

King Charles III wears the Imperial State Crown on specific ceremonial occasions, most notably during the State Opening of Parliament and at his coronation.

The crown is a symbol of the sovereign’s authority and is part of the British Crown Jewels.

Aside from the State Opening of Parliament and the coronation, there are no other regular occasions on which King Charles III would typically wear the Imperial State Crown.

The crown is reserved for these highly significant ceremonial events due to its historical and symbolic importance.

While the crown is part of the Crown Jewels and represents the authority of the monarch, its use is strictly limited to the most formal state ceremonies. Other crowns and regalia might be used for different occasions, but the Imperial State Crown is specifically designated for the two key events.

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As she toured the Channel Isles with King Charles this week, Queen Camilla was greeted with cheers and well-wishes from the crowds of people who had gathered to catch a glimpse of her.

Now celebrating her 77th birthday, we take a look back at how Her Majesty The Queen broke the mould as a former mistress to became a Ma’am and win over everyone she met.

It was a warm summer’s day in 1970 when a 22-year-old Prince Charles locked eyes with Camilla Shand at a polo match in Windsor Great Park.

As the future King of England, many likely spoke to Charles with a quiet, awed deference – but 24-year-old Camilla, who friends described as ‘outgoing and cheerful’, with a ‘lust for life’, wasn’t afraid to crack a flirtatious gag at her own expense with a senior royal.

‘My great-grandmother was the mistress of your great-great-grandfather,’ she was said to have quipped. ‘So how about it?’

This was the beginning of Charles and Camilla’s royal romance: but what was initially described as a ‘blissful and peaceful’ match soon erupted into a lifelong love affair which scandalised the nation, rocked the house of Windsor, and left commentators wondering whether Charles could ever be a suitable King.

Proving his critics wrong, King Charles and Queen Camilla were crowned at Westminster Abbey on May 6, 2023 in an historic coronation ceremony watched by millions around the world.

In the years following the exposure of her affair with the then-Prince Charles in 1992, Camilla has proven herself to be far more than the ‘third person’ in the marriage between Charles and Diana.

Take, for example the offers from various Americans she’s met – who discreetly tell her they can share the numbers of their plastic surgeons if she wants to have some ‘work’. Camilla happily re-tells this story, and hoots with laughter.

Her natural demeanour even won over her once-harshest critic – Queen Elizabeth, who initially blamed Charles’ long-time love for the break-up of his unhappy marriage to Diana.

When Charles and Camilla finally wed in April 2005 – decades after their romance started in the 1970s – the date coincided with the Grand National, and Queen Elizabeth couldn’t attend the ceremony because she had a horse running.

But the Queen did make a speech at the reception later, and said she had two important announcements.

The first was that Hedgehunter had won the race at Aintree; the second was that, at Windsor, she was delighted to be welcoming her son and his bride to the winners’ enclosure.

Queen Elizabeth added with a smile: ‘They have overcome Becher’s Brook and The Chair and all kinds of other terrible obstacles. They have come through, and I’m very proud and wish them well. My son is home and dry with the woman he loves.’

Since then, Camilla – who has been described as a ‘feminist icon’ by one commentator, has given the antiquated and sometimes detached monarchy some grounding – with her ‘delightful’ and ‘approachable’ personality (alongside a savvy PR strategy) helping her pave her way to public acceptance as the UK’s new Queen.

Such a gregarious and outgoing nature was apparent even in her younger years. Born in 1947 to a well-to-do family (her father was an army major turned businessman, her mother a daughter of a Baron), she split her days between her two homes in Sussex and Kensington. Describing her childhood as ‘perfect’, she forged extremely tight-knit relationships with her younger siblings Annabel, now 73, and Mark (who died aged 62 in 2014), and her parents, spending her days horse riding and reading.

As a young woman on the fringes of the aristocracy, Camilla was less interested in pursuing a career. For most young women of her class, finding a wealthy and influential husband was the main goal, which may be why Camilla was sent to a Swiss finishing school aged 16, before concluding her education in Paris.

‘She wanted no more from life than to be happily married to an upper-class man and live a sociable life in the country with horses, dogs, children, and someone to look after them all and do the hard graft,’ Penny Junor explains in her book The Duchess: Camilla Parker Bowles and the Love Affair That Rocked the Crown.

Her chance meeting with Charles looked like a safe bet, with the pair dating briefly after they first met in the 70s, but this blossoming romance was quickly quashed by unfortunate circumstances: Charles was going away for eight months to serve in the Navy.

Senior royals were also thought to be somewhat scathing about Camilla’s suitability to be so closely tied to the heir to the throne.

Charles’s godmother, Patricia, 2nd Countess Mountbatten of Burma, was particularly cutting about the now-Queen. ‘[Marriage] wouldn’t have been possible, not then,’ she told her biographer Giles Brandreth. ‘Camilla had a “history” – and you didn’t want a past that hung about.’

While Charles was away, Camilla met and married Andrew Parker Bowles – an Army Cavalry Officer 12 years her senior, who had previously enjoyed a brief fling with Princess Anne, Charles’s younger sister.

The pair went on to have two children: food critic Tom Parker Bowles and art curator Laura Lopes, but things between them certainly weren’t rosy. Parker Bowles was a renowned womaniser, and was thought to have repeatedly cheated on Camilla.

Despite their relationship thought to be over, Camilla remained close to Charles and the King was even made the godfather of her son, Tom.

The pair, who shared a keen interest in Shakespeare, polo and sense of humour, managed to keep their bond strong even if their romance had cooled.

‘She treated him like a normal person, as she had when they were together, and if ever he behaved badly, or was selfish or thoughtless, she wasn’t afraid to tell him so,’ Junor writes in The Duchess. ‘She was a proper friend.’

Charles claimed to his authorised biographer, Jonathan Dimbleby, that their long-standing affair restarted in 1986. 

‘That they loved each other was not in any doubt: in Camilla Parker Bowles, the prince found the warmth, the understanding and the steadiness for which he had always longed and had never been able to find with any other person,’ Dimbleby wrote in his biography of Charles.

However, the release of the book Diana: Her True Story in June of 1992 by Andrew Morton, alongside Diana’s now-controversial interview with BBC’s Martin Bashir in 1995, where she infamously claimed there had been ‘three of us in this marriage’, naturally led to widespread revile for Camilla.

Quickly, she became newspaper fodder, being described ‘as the most hated woman in Britain’. Diana herself likened Camilla to ‘a Rottweiler.’ 

With Charles making their relationship official public knowledge in 1999, the future King was keen for Camilla to be welcomed into ‘The Firm’, a tall order, considering her largely negative press and the Queen’s reportedly glacial relationship towards her.

However, it was down to palace aides to help rehabilitate Camilla’s image, and after their first photo opportunity together at the Ritz to celebrate Camilla’s sister’s 50^th birthday in 1999, the Queen seemingly gave her seal of approval a year later, when the late monarch attended another birthday party with Camilla in tow.

With Charles receiving his mother’s blessing for the pair to marry in 2005, Camilla treated the ceremony with trepidation. Having faced such an onslaught of abuse at the hands of the press and the public, she feared she was going to be booed at their wedding in Windsor Castle.

‘Camilla had been public enemy number one for much of the 1990s,’ Junor writes. ‘But by the time she and Charles married, I think some people’s attitudes were beginning to soften, and the reception they had from the crowds in Windsor on the day of the wedding was almost entirely positive.’

The approval of Prince Harry and Prince William is also thought to help Camilla’s image.

‘To be honest with you, she’s always been very close to me and William,’ Prince Harry said in a 2005 interview. ‘She’s not the wicked stepmother.’

In more recent years, Camilla has not been afraid to get stuck in and get her hands dirty when it comes to royal duties: a patron of over 90 charities, she has been outspoken on topics that can affect women no matter their social standing.

Indeed, close friends of Camilla have been struck by her growing confidence since the death of the late Queen.

One pal told Metro.co.uk: ‘Camilla is very self-conscious about her position and would never wish to upstage any member of the Royal Family but she is increasingly comfortable in her new role.

‘She is the perfect foil for the King because she is happy to dive into any conversation and has no hesitation in asking questions if she’s unsure about something.

‘The King does have very particular interests and sometimes feels awkward in certain situations but Camilla can handle most situations and be authentic at the same time.’

Another long-time confidante said: ‘People always say she is very down to earth but that really doesn’t do her justice.

‘It’s very true that she will speak her mind with the King and with the senior courtiers and advisers because she is also very savvy and has very good instincts about people and issues, especially current affairs.

‘She has no time for nonsense and when she is working a room, she will happily stay talking to a person she personally finds particularly interesting while her aides want to rush her along to meet as many people as possible.’

Another friend admitted that Camilla had initially considered the prospect of being Queen ‘daunting’ even though it had been discussed nearly two years ago with the Archbishop of Canterbury with the blessing of the late Queen Elizabeth.

‘It has never been a title she has actively sought or coveted but she does have an enormous sense of duty and loyalty to the King and if her being Queen alongside the King is the best way for her to be supportive of him that’s what she will do – but it will not change the way she is or the quirks of her own distinctive personality.’

Indeed, on a 2023 visit to Liverpool to the Eurovision song contest arena, when they met the UK’s entry Mae Muller, Camilla was heard to say: ‘I hope I don’t get nul points,’ a jokey reference to the Eurovision points system.

It’s thought that Camilla’s most valuable asset is her ordinariness, despite her hugely privileged upbringing and background. Joan Rivers described the new Queen as ‘rough around the edges… in a good way,’ with her down to earth rambunctiousness sorely needed in an institution which regularly labelled as out of touch.

While generations of royals may have toasted their health with the finest of champagne, down-to-earth Queen Camilla prefers toast topped with baked beans, mud beneath her fingernails after a day of gardening, Happy Valley on the TV and a bawdy joke.

A well-publicised fan of both Strictly Come Dancing and The Great British Bake Off, she’s previously been papped doing her weekly shop in Sainsbury’s and once only claimed to own ‘one smart dress from Monsoon’ – providing further relatability when compared to the royals that previously dripped in jewels and lived a life of pomp and pageantry.

But while she may be more at home with a copy of Horse And Hound and a G&T than a formal royal event, Camilla can nonetheless charm and dazzle when required, as King Charles’ Queen.

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