Can Anyone Replace Diana?

Though the death itself may be indelible, it takes a full year even to begin to understand what has been lost and what gained--a year to pass through the seasons of grief: Christmas, Mother's Day, Father's Day, birthdays and beach days and school days in between. Diana, Princess of Wales, died in a car crash 12 months ago, but to her family and the international community of those who mourn her, it has been a transformative lifetime. One year on, an older, grayer Prince Charles, approaching his 50th birthday, has quietly taken to wearing his wedding band once again--a sign of sorrow and affection glinting from beneath the signet ring on his left little finger. At the same time, the prince appears happier and more relaxed than ever before--as if he and Britain have at last reached an accommodation, a liberation from past demons.

Recently, while visiting a community center in a Welsh town that is wilting under high unemployment, Charles was inspecting some art pinned to the wall when he was asked by teacher Andrew Herbert to draw something. The accomplished amateur painter obliged immediately, dashing off a witty sketch of Jason Rossington, 14, complete with mop of peroxided hair. Explaining later how he summoned the nerve to thrust felt-tip pen and paper in front of the heir to the throne, Herbert said it took no nerve at all: "You feel relaxed with him, as though you've known him for a long time." Just last week a poll showed Prince Charles to be more popular than he was before the death of Diana.

Nevertheless, one year later, it is clear that the "people's princess" can never be replaced--not for her sons William and Harry, not for the millions of people who benefited from her charity or basked in her flirtatious charm, and not for those others who saw in Diana's frailties and unhappiness a reflection of their own. No royal front runner has emerged to supplant the Princess of Wales in the hearts of the people or on the front pages of the tabloids. But the death of the princess appears to have done the unexpected: it has not only reinvigorated the monarchy itself but has also burnished the picture of an intimate family unit--Charles, William and Harry, with increasingly regular appearances by Charles' longtime lover, Camilla Parker Bowles--that appears to be affectionate, complex, fun-loving and modern, the very territory the princess had staked out for herself. Says Harold Brooks-Baker, the publishing director of Burke's Peerage, a guide to all that is officially noble in Britain: "It's extraordinary that the person who in life did the most to destroy the House of Windsor in death has done the most to preserve it."