The Queen also had a reason for private rejoicing in that Jubilee year, when on November 15 Princess Anne gave birth to Peter Philips. The news was given to the Queen in a telephone call just before she was due to hold an investiture in the Buckingham Palace ballroom, and she was unable to resist sharing it with the honours recipients, saying:
‘I have just had a message from the hospital. My daughter has given birth to a son, and I am now a grandmother.’
In the 1980s the Queen welcomed two daughters-in-law into her family, but with controversial results. The third, PR girl Sophie Rhys-Jones, married Prince Edward in 1999, and was rarely far from the headlines. There must have been moments in the last decade of the old century when the Queen felt that her whole life was unravelling before her, and that the rocks upon which she had based a long and successful reign had turned to sand.
In 1992 the marriages of three of her four children collapsed, and such a catalogue of unhappy events befell her that, in a speech at a Guildhall lunch to mark her 40 years as Queen, she christened the year her ‘annus horribilis’. The dramatic effect of her delivery was heightened by a voice which had fallen prey to smoke and chill air as she wandered miserably through the blackened debris of the fire which four days earlier ravaged Windsor Castle, her favourite home.
The ultimate hideousness, of course, came in the late summer of 1997, with the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. The Queen returned to London from Balmoral the day before Diana’s funeral; in a stark change from private to very public mourning, made in response to the emotional convulsion which, at the time, gripped the country. It is arguable whether she misjudged the public mood, but at the time she saw her first duty as looking after her devastated grandsons in the seclusion of her Scottish retreat.
