Queen for a New Day

Britain's Lady Diana, at 19, the fairest of them all

Past the classic first editions bound in leather, pages leafed in gold. Past the photographs, all framed in hand-worked silver. Past the old oak tables crowded with souvenirs of distant, long-lived lives, toward a deep chair washed in the dim gold light of a British late autumn.

The man there looks up. He is of indeterminate age but clearly senior bearing. He smiles slightly, then turns down the volume of an old radio that is playing a familiar fragment from Mouret's Symphony and Fanfare for the King's Supper. He crosses his legs, letting the toe of his bench-made oxford dangle a little above the floor and occasionally—at moments of infrequent agitation—allowing it to graze the surface of the carpet underfoot.

He arranges his book in his lap, keeping his place casually with a finger, as if he does not expect to be interrupted for long. He settles back. He speaks.

"Good evening. I'm Alistair Booke. Welcome once again to the 50th anniversary of Masterpiece Theater, and the third chapter of our series Monarchy in Love. We have already seen the dedicated and rambunctious Prince of Wales—who had not yet become Charles III—in the sunset years of his bachelorhood, struggling to maintain his independence while hewing to a royal role that sometimes interfered with the imperatives of young manhood.

"Now young Wales, as he was known to intimates, was fully aware of the importance of his position, and worked tirelessly at the endless ceremonial duties the Prince must perform. One of these duties did not come so naturally to him as the others, however. That was marriage. He applied himself to that particular inevitability with not quite as much stamina but fully as much ingenuity as he devoted to mastering the steeplechase.

"It will be recalled from our first episode, Where's Charlie?, that the Prince took several nasty spills on the course about this time, and many of his subjects, who were aware that two previous Kings had died after horseback catastrophes, fretted about his wellbeing. Charles' attempts to find a suitable bride—or the attempts by the press to find one for him—resulted in many false starts, much bruised feeling and the occasional contretemps that seems, in retrospect, almost comic. At the time though, his quest was no laughing matter. Anthony Holden, one of his biographers, recalls that Charles became 'obsessed with the subject of marriage' and often noted, with a touch of sadness, that most of his friends were wed. We saw the feelings of his parents, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, turn from indulgence to impatience until, one long weekend when the Prince was away and unreachable, the Queen gave vent to the slightly petulant and now famous question that lent the episode its title.