HERE COMES WILLS

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That's questionable. William shows affection for both his parents--chumming up with Charles and protecting Diana. It is likely that he has learned from her as well as the Windsors, and that would be to his advantage. Especially in his early years, she led the way to a more open boyhood and to some contact with the nation's disadvantaged. As Diana moves into her 40s, some of the media attention will focus on handsome, eligible Wills. Says Edward Pilkington, who writes on the royals for the Guardian: "The monarchy needs someone who is seen to be as popular as Diana--and I think he probably will be. And it needs someone who is prepared to change it, bring it into step with other institutions of the next century."

Society may change even faster in the next 25 years than it has in the last. Wills will preside over a much reduced list of who is "royal." And he will have to make the institution credible to the country while at the same time not stint on the elaborate ceremonies that give the crown most of its luster. One step in the right direction is that Wills is a fan of soccer, a game his countrymen are fanatic about but which most royals, who seem to associate athletic endeavor with horses, ignore.

Just one of the problems he will probably face is raised by Yale's British historian Linda Colley: "Whom will he find to marry him?" She notes that over the past hundred years, the monarchy has recruited women like Queen Mary, George V's consort, who epitomized royal womanhood's acquiescence and sense of duty, and the present Queen Mother, who has been just as responsible and effervescent as well. Diana was very young and inexperienced, sexually and otherwise. Where, Colley asks, are such young women to be found in this age of independence, blossoming careers and cohabitation?

Wills will have a powerful role in shaping the monarchy in the coming century, and as Starkey points out, Buckingham Palace is beginning to make use of him. He cannot afford to stumble. The burdens are enormous, but at least he is surrounded by billowing gusts of goodwill. He may be that stable leader who is so badly needed to strengthen a besieged but valuable institution.

--Reported by Barry Hillenbrand/London