Prime Minister Tony Blair was onto “the mood” so quickly that you feel he must have partaken of it. To her subjects, the flag was an emblem-a display-of grief and a display of grief was what they were demanding. To the Queen, the flag (or its absence) was an emblem of her nonnegotiable inheritance. Sign up for Classics, a twice-weekly newsletter featuring notable pieces from the past.Īs in all matters royal, we are dealing here not with pros and cons, with arguments and counter-arguments we are dealing with signs and symbols, with fever and magic. But the Windsors hadn’t yet sensed which way the wind was blowing. (“A lot of people,” an aide said, “were heavily scarred by it.”) The desperate courtiers were unanimous: the flag must go up. Within the inner circle, the dispute was unprecedentedly fearsome. The flag at the palace doesn’t go halfway down for anybody’s death, even the monarch’s. Flags were flying at half-mast at other royal seats the flag at the palace, however, flies only when the Queen is staying there (and she was still in Scotland: a further scandal). “We don’t have protocol here,” an eminent courtier once drawled, “just bloody good manners.” But national cohesion, and indeed public order, now depended on a preposterous punctilio: the people wanted a flag flying at half-mast above Buckingham Palace, and the Queen wasn’t having it. Certainly, King Egbert (802-39) would not have known what to make of it and neither did Queen Elizabeth II (1952- ). By the following Thursday, the Royal Family was facing the strangest crisis in its history. “The world’s going to go completely mad,” Charles said, presciently, when he heard. (It was Sunday.) Prince William, then fifteen, wanted to attend-so he could “talk to Mummy.” Was everyone sure? he asked would somebody check? The boys were asked if they would like to accompany the family to church. Prince Harry, then twelve, couldn’t quite take it in. Prince Charles was in residence, with his sons the Queen advised him not to wake them (they would need all their strength), adding, “We must get the radios out of their rooms.” Charles broke the news just after seven. Word of the car crash reached Balmoral Castle, in Scotland, at one o’clock in the morning of August 31, 1997.
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