On the eve of The Queen’s visit to Australia, the Duke of Cambridge tells biographer Robert Hardman how she played a vital part in his big day.
The engagement had just been announced, and Prince William and Catherine Middleton had finished posing for the media, that famous sapphire ring sparkling in the camera flashes. Now it was time to plan the royal wedding of the century. Eager to include all their close friends in the big day, the young couple began to draw up the guest list. But they found they had been pipped at the post by Buckingham Palace.
“I came into the first meeting for the wedding, post-engagement,” William, 29, reveals, “and I was given this official list of 777 names – dignitaries, governors, all sorts of people – and not one person I knew. “They said, ‘These are the people we should invite.’ I looked at it in absolute horror and said, ‘I think we should start again.’” It was the Queen who came to his rescue. “I rang her up the next day and said, ‘Do we need to be doing this?’” he says. “And she said, ‘No. Start with your friends first and then go from there.’ And she told me to bin the list.”
The list was duly “binned”. On other wedding matters, however, William rapidly learned there was absolutely no room for manoeuvre. For instance, he says, “I wanted to decide what to wear for the wedding.” As a commissioned officer in the army and the navy, and a serving member of the Royal Air Force, the prince certainly had a few choices. Except that he did not. “I was given a ategorical, ‘No, you’ll wear this!’” he says. This time, it was his grandmother who was laying down the law. Having just appointed William to the position of Colonel of the Irish Guards, the Queen, 85, was quite clear that her grandson should be getting married in that uniform. “So you don’t always get what you want, put it that way,” the prince laughs. “But I knew perfectly well that it was for the best.”
In any case, as a serving officer in Her Majesty’s Armed Forces, he couldn’t disobey an order from the Commander-in-Chief, the monarch herself. “She is incredible,” says William, during a poignant and thoughtful first interview on someone he describes as “my grandmother first – and then she’s the Queen”. No-one is better placed to imagine what it must have been like to succeed to the throne as the Queen did 60 years ago, aged 25. Sitting in his office in St James’s Palace in London, William ponders the enormity of her task. “Back then, there was a very different attitude to women,” he says. “Being a young lady at 25 and stepping into a job which many men thought they could probably do better, it must have been very daunting.”
Read more about Prince William’s relationship with his grandmother in this week’s Woman’s Day on sale October 3, 2011.
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