Elizabeth II 1926-2022 | A family life not always peaceful

(London) Being a mother is never easy. Being queen and mother is not necessarily more so, and Elizabeth II had her share of worries with her children until the end of her life.

His son Andrew, reputedly his favorite, darkened his last years, accused in New York of sexually assaulting a minor in the context of his troubled friendship with the dead millionaire Jeffrey Epstein. He paid his accuser Virginia Giuffre millions in a financial settlement to avoid trial. Stripped of his military titles and patronage, he became an outcast within the royal family.

With his eldest son Charles succeeding him after spending his life waiting, relations have often been complicated.

Elisabeth was 22 when she was born, and 24 for Princess Anne.

At the time she was only a princess, heiress to the Crown, but she sometimes left for months to join her husband Philip, a naval officer stationed in Malta, or for tours abroad. Charles and Anne stay with their nannies and governesses, as Elisabeth had experienced as a child.

Charles’ nanny was “very bossy,” monarchy expert Penny Junor told AFP. “The princess was young, the nanny took over.” Elizabeth “was waiting for the nurse to bring her Charles half an hour at teatime.”

For this expert, “no doubt” that the queen, very busy with her duties, loved her family. But “she was not very demonstrative”.

In old family photos and videos, we see a smiling Elisabeth posing with Charles in his pram, or with the family, waving a rattle in front of Prince Andrew, who was born when Charles was 11 years old. But tenderness does not show.

When little Charles, 5, joins his parents back from a tour of several months in the Commonwealth, the queen reaches out to him.

“She was more detached than indifferent,” the Prince of Wales would later say in an authorized biography.

“If he had been a horse or a dog, they would have been much closer,” says Penny Junor of Charles, a sensitive and clumsy child, and his mother, who loved horses and corgis.

Princess Anne, equestrian emeritus and outgoing personality, has this common passion with Elizabeth II, which will bring them together in adolescence.

The protocol does not help: children and grandchildren must bow to the queen.

The relationship with Charles is all the more complicated as he is the heir to the throne. His fate depends on the death of his mother. “He always adored his mother, he put her on a pedestal. But it’s not a mother-son relationship, rather a monarch-subject relationship, ”notes Penny Junor.

With her two youngest sons, Andrew and Edward, born when she was 33 and 37, the Queen will have a more relaxed relationship, even stepping back from her obligations for a few months after their birth.

Annus horribilis

The four children will be sent very young to boarding school.

In 1992, three of them separated from their spouses: Anne divorced from Mark Phillips, Charles separated from Diana after a disastrous marriage, and Andrew separated from Sarah Ferguson. An “annus horribilis” will say the queen.

For years, she refuses the idea of ​​Charles remarrying Camilla, his longtime love and mistress. She will not come to their civil wedding in 2005, but will host a reception at Windsor Castle.

“I don’t think there’s the slightest bit of evidence to suggest she didn’t care about us,” Princess Anne will say of her mother in a BBC documentary.

The queen has also had to deal in recent months with the threat of a secret book by her grandson Harry, who has abandoned all royal obligations and rebuilt his life in California with his American wife Meghan Markle. The couple had already unpacked their resentment in 2021 against the royal family in an interview on American television, suggesting in particular that they were racist.

Scheduled for the coming months, the release of this book raises questions after the death of the sovereign.

Eight times grandmother and twelve times great-grandmother, she loved family meals, Christmas parties at her residence in Sandrigham.

Her grandson William, to whom she was close, paid her a strong tribute in the preface to a biography, praising her “kindness and her sense of humor”, her “love of the family” and “a life of service to the public” who served as a “model”.