C2206

In February 1952, Philip was resting at Sagana Lodge in Kenya when his aide, Commander Michael Parker, received a coded telephone message. The pre-arranged signal, "Hyde Park Corner," had been relayed from Sandringham to Buckingham Palace, confirming the death of King George VI. Parker found a wireless set, positioned it away from Elizabeth, and switched … Read more

On April 29, 2011, a woman in a pale powder blue coat walked the length of the nave at Westminster Abbey and took her seat a few feet from the throne of England. An estimated two billion people watched her do it. The cameras found her within the first minute, because the cameras had been … Read more

In 1927, on a horse field in Canada, a quiet man in steel-rimmed spectacles watched a prince ride in a point-to-point race and found himself hoping the prince would fall and break his neck. He was not a revolutionary or an enemy of the throne. He was the prince's own private secretary, the man paid … Read more

On the afternoon of January 18, 1919, at Wood Farm on the Sandringham estate in Norfolk, a 13-year-old boy suffered a seizure and stopped breathing. The room was small, the light already failing in the deep of an English winter. The boy was Prince John, the youngest son of King George V and Queen Mary. … Read more

Diana Spencer was not a naive girl from the English countryside who stumbled into the most photographed marriage of the century and found the machinery frightening. That story has been told so many times it has worn grooves into the culture, in films, memoirs, documentaries, stage productions, and no fewer than three separate television series, … Read more

In the early 1970s, inside a 20-room apartment at Kensington Palace, Princess Margaret opened the drawer where she kept her gloves and found a piece of paper her husband had left for her. It was a list. According to the biographer Anne de Courcy, who spent years interviewing the man who wrote it, the list … Read more

On the morning of April 11, 1919, an elderly woman in black stood on the quayside at Yalta Harbor and watched British sailors load her trunks onto a warship. She was 71 years old. Her eldest son had been murdered nine months earlier in a basement in Yekaterinburg, along with his wife and all five … Read more