According to her wishes, Charles enrolled Harry at Eton, where he will reside in William's house. As for William, "Charles wants to introduce him to his royal role, albeit gently," says Archer. For now, Charles's main goal is to provide the emotional support his sons need to heal. "Charles and the boys," Archer says, "are a close family."

You've got to hand it to her: over the past six years, Parker Bowles has been condemned, resurrected and buried again. Yet she has come through it all with her humor intact, even using—prior to the tragedy in Paris—Diana's epithet on herself by answering the phone in her Wiltshire home, "Rottweiler here." Friends aren't surprised. "Camilla is very good at laughing at herself," says author Jilly Cooper. "That's what has saved her through the appalling mauling she has had."

Nor has she ever been anything but discreet. After news of her private June 12 meeting with Prince William at St. James's Palace appeared in newspapers last month, Parker Bowles was quick to accept the resignation of part-time aide Amanda MacManus, who confessed to inadvertently leaking the story in pillow talk with her husband, a Times newspaper executive. (He then mentioned it to a pal in New Zealand, who in turn passed it on to his tennis partner, The Sun's chief reporter, John Kay.)

Parker Bowles's patience began to pay off in the weeks before Diana's death. On July 18, 1997, she and Charles appeared together openly—though privately—at the 50th-birthday party he threw for her at Highgrove. "Having been the most vilified person in the country, Camilla had just about crawled out of the bunker," says her biographer Christopher Wilson. Even Diana had backed off. "She had to accept the relationship," says Majesty's Seward, "because it wasn't doing her any good being obsessive about it."

Diana's death, however, "was bad news for Camilla," adds Seward. "All the love that had been directed toward Diana could easily be directed in hatred toward her." After lying low for months afterward, Parker Bowles is testing the waters once more. How the public responds will be clear when she and Charles appear publicly as a couple. (Bets are on the Oct. 29 wedding of Santa Palmer-Tomkinson, the daughter of Charles's close friends Charles and Patty, to Simon Sebag-Montefiore.) Meanwhile, Parker Bowles appears to have won the acceptance of those who matter most. At their father's birthday play on July 31, William and Harry sat her in a place of honor, next to Charles. "They don't see her as a villain," says author Wade. "She too has had a rough time."

She had suffered her share of setbacks in 1992, the year she called her annus horribilis. But the days immediately following Diana's death were among the bleakest for the Queen. The public's reaction to such gaffes as the family's retreating behind the doors of Balmoral and the Queen's refusal to break with protocol and fly a flag at half-mast—or at all—at Buckingham Palace in honor of the princess, even though the Queen wasn't in residence, was summed up by a headline in The Express: "Show Us You Care."

She got the message. On the eve of the funeral she addressed the nation live from Buckingham Palace. And within eight months the Queen, now 72, could be found on her first official foray ever to a pub (during a tour of Devon) and riding in a taxi (another first, to promote environmentally friendly liquefied petroleum fuel). Though some reforms—such as the disclosure of certain royal financial records—had been in the works for some time, "Diana's death provided the jolt that was needed," says the Queen's biographer Ben Pimlott. "She showed the way forward."

Indeed, last month the Queen even hinted that she had given up wearing fur except on her ceremonial robes. What's next: a nose ring? Not likely (although body piercing has invaded the Palace: Princess Anne's daughter Zara is sporting a stud in her tongue). But there's no doubt that change is afoot in the hallowed House of Windsor. With the Queen's consent, Tony Blair's Labour government decommissioned the royal yacht Britannia, saving taxpayers some $12 million a year. Royal travel expenses became public, revealing, among other extravagances, the Queen's $17,600 trip aboard the royal train to 1997's Derby horse races. The Queen put up no resistance to the government's proposal to abolish primogeniture (an eldest son's right to precede an older sister to the throne). And, on her own initiative, the Queen pronounced an end to compulsory bowing and curtsying (though they're still appreciated).

Further fine-tuning of the Queen's image awaits the arrival of her new $368,000-a-year communications director, Simon Lewis, 39, who is due to start work in September. But the media are already impressed. "The Queen showed a new face to the nation," the Mail on Sunday editorialized after the monarch had chatted with rock singer Julie Thompson, 21, at a Buckingham Palace function in April. "She publicly embraced, for the first time, the generation that will decide the future of the House of Windsor and won it over."

Public opinion may be harder to sway. "We have become a lot less reverential and a lot less deferential," says royals author Brian Hoey. "People no longer believe royalty walks on water." But if they no longer rule the waves, the royals still serve a purpose. "The monarchy provides the social glue that binds people together," says Pimlott. And, as the headlines of the past year show, "people remain enormously interested in all things royal."

In Britain the measure of a bounder can often be gauged by the number of his former lovers who have vented to the press. Earl Spencer, the man once known as Champagne Charlie, certainly has had his share. But Josie Borain, 35—the former Calvin Klein model who accompanied the earl to Diana's funeral and supported him through his messy divorce from wife Victoria before quietly dumping him in January—looked like a holdout. For a while.

"I found him calculating and manipulative," Borain finally blurted to the Mail on Sunday in July, adding that Spencer, 34, had cheated on her at least once and had had some 20 lovers during his marriage. "Generally," she said of their 10-month affair, "it was a bad investment, a waste of good-quality-loving time."

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