- Elizabeth II, the world's longest-reigning monarch. - The Queen has a life that is quite unlike that of any other woman. - For nearly seven decades, the Queen has served her country, but as well as head of state, she is also the head of a family. - The moment she starts talking about the sanctity of the family, the whole family falls apart. - So has a lifetime of duty come at a cost? Throughout her reign, her family and the Crown have pulled the Queen in opposite directions. - She was being asked to make a choice between duty and family. - Now we'll examine the key family conflicts within her marriage to Philip,... - Philip, in a tantrum, an angry tantrum, saying, 'Why won't you give me this bloody name?' - ...with her sister, Margaret, and with her sons, Charles and Andrew. - She did say, I think, to the Queen Mother once, 'Where have I gone wrong?' - It's a story that's played out in the privacy of palace walls, observed by only a handful of insiders. - Both come away distressed about the degree of the Queen's distress. - While the history of the House of Windsor is well known, hidden in vaults and archives across the country, a story's waiting to be uncovered. With access to previously classified documents, private diaries, and secret communiques, this series can now reveal some of the secrets of the royals. Captions were made with support from NZ On Air. www.able.co.nz Copyright Able 2021 - The royal family and Princess Elizabeth's fiance have permitted these special film studies to be made in response to the rapidly mounting worldwide interest in the forthcoming royal wedding on the 20th of November in Westminster Abbey. - 1947. The 21-year-old Princess Elizabeth presented her new fiance to an eager public. But unlike other brides, wedding planning for the heir to the throne required consulting the government. - Originally, they wanted a quiet wedding. They thought it would be more appropriate to get married in St George's Chapel Windsor and just have a very low-key small wedding. And the government said, 'No. Let's have a celebration. Let's cheer people up.' - Two years after the end of the Second World War, Britain was still in the grip of austerity, with high unemployment and food and essentials rationed. - The wedding would be a morale booster. It had to bear a really heavy propaganda mission. It had to be optimistic, and it was all about rebirth and the future, not just about the future of the monarchy but also about the future of Britain as well. - The greyness of this November day matching, in some respects, the weary aftermath of war. These were neither seen nor felt, for this was a day of national rejoicing. - The ceremony was broadcast live on the radio and beamed around the world to an audience of 200 million. - It's like a sort of burst of sunlight after a sort of week of storms. - Suddenly, this glamorous young couple. And I think it's really important remember how glamorous they were. The Queen at that age looked stunning. And Prince Philip was like some marvellous sort of Viking prince. - And how they cheered the happy pair when they came out on to the balcony. - For her wedding, Elizabeth had dutifully delivered a public spectacle. But her choice of husband had been controversial. - In the establishment, there had been lots of disapproval of Philip as a potential husband for Elizabeth. - The couple had met when Elizabeth was just a child but were introduced again in 1939 when the royal family made a visit to Dartmouth Naval College, captured in this footage. Philip, then an 18-year-old cadet helped show the 13-year-old Elizabeth around. - He really impresses her. When they're going off in the royal yacht, a convoy of boats follows the yacht, and his is the last of the convoy of rowing boats to stay up with the yacht, so she really notices him. - Elizabeth fell in love with Philip on the spot. She was enraptured, entranced by him, but Philip did not feel the same way. She was just a child. - The meeting was likely orchestrated by Philip's uncle, Lord Mountbatten, a friend of King George VI. He had dynastic ambitions of his own. - There was always this sense that Mountbatten was trying to take over the royal family, that Philip was his weapon, that Philip was the sort of Trojan horse through which Mountbatten's influence would become felt. - Philip spent the war fighting in the navy, but when on leave, he was able to see Elizabeth, now in her late teens. - He comes back from the war and courts her very intensively. I mean, some of the ways in which Philip has to court her, they're not really his kind of thing. He's a sophisticated young man, and yet he has to go and drink orange juice in the nursery with Margaret as an escort. - The Princess was the biggest catch in Europe, and some questioned Philip's motives. - Was there some element of gold digging in this? You know, the Queen was an heir to a throne. Philip had none of that. - Born into the Greek royal family, Philip had been exiled after the Greek monarchy was overthrown. - Well, Philip had no money. He had no lands. He had nothing, really, other than his charm and hit wit and the clothes he stood up in. And, of course, he was very royal, but the household didn't like him because they thought he was too German. - Although he had fought with distinction for the British during the war, two of Philip's sisters had been married to Nazi officers. - It's said that the Queen Mother used to refer to Prince Philip as 'the Hun', not altogether jokingly. - The fact that some of the Philip's sisters married Nazis might have been a bit bothersome, but it didn't mean that Philip was a Nazi. And in many ways, Philip would have seemed to be eligible because he was obviously a good stud, and the royal family tends to look at marriages in terms of thoroughbreds and horse breeding. - Resting on Elizabeth's choice was not just her own happiness but the future of the House of Windsor. Tommy Lascelles, King George VI's private secretary, revealed just why many at court feared that Philip could be a liability. - The family were at first horrified when they saw Prince Philip was making up to Princess Elizabeth. They felt he was rough, ill-mannered, uneducated, and would prove unfaithful. - What they find is inevitably the life of a young rake. - During the 1930s, he was described as having armfuls of girls around him all the time, so he looked a slightly rackety character. - At the front of their minds was, 'Is he going to be faithful?' That was absolutely critical. It was critical that the Queen's marriage should be strong and that it should not end in some kind of divorce. - Once queen, Elizabeth would be head of the Church of England, which did not recognise divorce. - She cannot be divorced. You can't have a divorced head of the church, so the marriage has to succeed. - Fresh in their minds was the monarchy's last brush with divorce. Elizabeth's uncle, Edward VIII, had abdicated the throne in order to marry a divorced woman. - I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility without the help and support of the woman I love. - Edward her chosen love over royal duty, and public confidence in the monarchy was rocked. - Queen Elizabeth's reign was really lived in the shadow of the abdication. Once a divorce caused this terrible crisis for the monarchy, divorce became a totally unacceptable thing. - It's very important to them that Elizabeth marriage and her family is perfect and is seen to be perfect, and anything that threatens that they think will threaten the integrity of the House of Windsor. - With the establishment frowning on Philip, the young princess had a choice ` toe the line or follow her heart. - She was prepared to go against her own family and do just exactly what she wanted. - The Queen has a very stubborn streak, and despite the opposition, she stuck her heels in, and she said, 'No, I want to marry him.' (ENGINE RUMBLES) PHONE: My dad always taught me that you gotta ride like everyone's out to get you. (LOUD WHOOSHING) (ENGINE RUMBLES SOFTLY) (ENGINE RUMBLES LOUDLY) I'll be learning to ride a bike for as long as I live. (ENGINE RUMBLES IN BURSTS) Ride for your whole life, not a short amount of time. - A year after their wedding, the newlyweds started a family of their own with the birth of their son, Charles. With the King still in his early 50s and the crown a seemingly distant prospect, Elizabeth and Philip could concentrate on being a family. - Elizabeth and Philip must have thought that they were going to have 10 to 15 years in which Philip would be able to achieve success within the navy. - In 1950, Philip was promoted to lieutenant commander and posted to Malta, where Elizabeth joined him. Married life now revolved around Philip's career. - These were perhaps the only times in the Queen's life when she was able to live a reasonably normal life. - He ruled the roost, and she was a sort of housewife. - She spends her time with the other wives, and she socialises, and she looks after Philip and supports him, and that is a real moment that both he and she really enjoy. - But in February 1952, while the couple were away on tour, news arrived that would bring duty centre stage. - The passing of King George VI came as a sudden and most grievous shock to his people all over the world. - The King had died, aged just 56. - Once word had come through officially, it was Prince Philip who was told first. Philip's friend and secretary, Mike Parker, said that Philip looked as if the world just fallen in on him. (FANFARE) - Long live the Queen. - What this means is that the relationship between Elizabeth and Philip is completely transformed. - It was almost epitomised by the moment the plane bringing them home touched down on the tarmac at London. Instead of the couple coming down the steps, the Queen came down to greet her ministers, and Prince Philip came a few steps behind, and that was the way it was going to be for the rest of his life. - Just four years after their wedding, Elizabeth's focus shifts from wife to queen. From now on, family decisions would have to be weighed against the demands of the crown. Aged just 25, Elizabeth was now Queen of the United Kingdom and head of the Commonwealth, a roll that completely changed the dynamic with her husband, Philip. - When the King dies, everything changes. It flips everything. She is queen. She is his superior. - The Queen's new role as head of state created a formidable workload. - I think the Queen was very, very busy being queen, so she had an enormous new role, presumably with her day timetable from 8 o'clock in the morning to 11 o'clock at night. - She was now sovereign. She had the most important job in the country. - A working week entailed daily red boxes of government papers, meetings with foreign dignitaries, engagements across the country, and an audience with her prime minister. - She was a young woman in a man's world, thrust in there very suddenly, and something had to go, and it was her family that really had to go, and she concentrated on duty. - Everybody rallied round her. The courtiers rallied round her and made sure that he didn't interfere. - While Elizabeth threw herself into the job, Philip's naval career was now terminated. In his new role as consort, he was expected to play the supportive spouse. - To have served in World War II, to have had that intoxicating, adrenaline-fuelled experience and to go from that in just a few years to sort of smiling weakly at endless garden parties, I mean, it must be utterly soul-destroying. - Philip would not be privy to his wife's dealings with her government. - Because Philip was Mountbatten's nephew, there may well have been worry that if Philip was given any kind of political power, he would try to implement Mountbatten's political agenda and act as though he was king. - What went on with the Queen and her prime ministers remained private and secret from him. And I think that must have been incredibly difficult. - In Philip's new life, he was not even able to choose where he lived. - They had to move out of Clarence House, and Philip said to Churchill, 'Please, please, at least can we stay at Clarence House?' and he said, 'Absolutely no way. The monarch has to live above the shop.' - So he found himself in this strange kind of pantomime world ruled by protocol. It was like sort of living in a kind of museum, and he resented it. In search of a role, Philip turned his attention to the royal household. - He set about reforming some of the more arcane practices in Buckingham Palace, like the powdering of footman's wigs, like sending a message verbally from one part of the giant palace to another rather than picking up a house phone. - He wanted to modernise the monarchy. This is the strange thing. I mean, he may seem a crusty old reactionary now, but at the time, he seemed to be very much a modern man. - Every time he tried to do something, there was a problem put in his way. - Another palace resident adjusting to their new role was Elizabeth's widowed mother, still only in her early 50s. - The Queen Mother wants Elizabeth's monarchy to be exactly the same as George VI, and Philip, he wants things to change. And so you see this battle, really, between the Queen Mother and Philip, between the past and the future, and Elizabeth is torn in between them. - The Queen Mother will not move, and Philip becomes exasperated by this, and there is a story that in the end, Philip has to resort to turning off the central heating in the Queen Mother's apartments, to sort of freezing her out of Buckingham Palace. - Elizabeth was now treading a fine line between the needs of her family and the demands of the crown. - I think in those early days, the Queen was utterly overwhelmed by her new role, so I suspect that for a while Philip was left to his own devices. Family and duty would collide in an explosive family argument when the Mountbattens staked a claim that the royal family should take Philip's name. - Mountbatten was at a dinner one night, and he declared that the House of Mountbatten would reign rather than the House of Windsor. And Queen Mary got to hear of this and was absolutely furious. - The idea that the Queen's children should be named Mountbatten absolutely appalled her. - As a constitutional monarch, Elizabeth was obliged to consult her government on the matter. - She was prepared to countenance it. In fact, she put some pressure on her prime minister to agree to this, and Churchill would not do so. - That was absolute anathema to the establishment. The royal family had only changed their name as recently as 1917 from the House of Saxe-Coburg Gotha to make it the very British-sounding Windsor. - The young sovereign faced a choice ` take on her government or deny her husband. - The Queen must have been conflicted by this, but I think she recognised the importance of the political argument, and for the Queen to go against the Prime Minister and the cabinet over such an issue would have been a really dangerous line to take. - Ahead of the coronation, the palace publicly declared that the Queen and her descendants would be known as the House of Windsor. - From Philip's point of view, coming at this particular moment, when he was already having difficulties adjusting to his new role ` or lack of it ` this was like the last straw. - He famously shouts at one point, 'I'm nothing but a bloody amoeba.' - I think it really was very hard for Philip. He had to have an outlet for all of this. (UPBEAT MUSIC) - One such outlet was just a mile away but a different world to the buttoned-up life of the palace. Soho was the epicentre of louche London and home to one of Philip's haunts, the Thursday Club. - The Thursday Club was set up by... a group of people, artists, journalists, filmmakers, photographers. - It must have seemed slightly sort of shocking and risque that Philip should go to a Soho club, where there were people behaving badly. - Periodically, the Duke appeared smelling of port and once climbing over the wall at Buckingham Palace to get back in. - This account by a member reveals an inside view of the club. - On an average night of the Thursday Club, there would be Prince Philip, Cecil Beaton, and maybe one or other of the Kray brothers. There would also be the ladies, the Duchess of Northumberland, the Percy, the Lady Devonshire. 'These are their titles?' I said, amazed. 'No,' he said. 'They're the pubs they work at.' - All kinds of rumours went round ` that it was wild and there were women and strippers; they were obviously whoring. - A sometime visitor to the club was Stephen Ward. Later made notorious by the Profumo affair, Ward was a society figure who specialised in introducing glamorous young women to upper-class men. - The fact that Stephen Ward was a member of this group doesn't suggest that it was entirely a monument to propriety, and the fact that the Duke of Edinburgh associated with people like Ward was not a not a good sign. - Philip's excursions from the palace did not go unnoticed. - She knew about it, and I think she really had no choice but to accept it. It was a man's world, remember. I don't think they were so considerate to women then. And certainly, he wouldn't have been scared of the fact that his wife might have been annoyed or upset. - The Thursday Club was not the only rumour doing the rounds about the Duke. - There were early stories about old flames of Philip that he remained friendly with, like Helene Corday, the nightclub owner in Soho, who was a long old girlfriend of his that he was reportedly still seeing after the marriage. London was peopled with old flames, so he's not gonna terminate that. - Philip had also been spotted in the company of Pat Kirkwood, an actress whose legs were described as the eighth wonder of the world. Kirkwood had met Philip when her then-boyfriend brought the Duke backstage to her dressing room. - They went out, and Philip, who is a fabulous dancer, took Pat Kirkwood in his arms and danced around all over the place in this nightclub. Anyhow, he didn't get home until very late, and that really sparked off the rumours, and those rumours refused to go away. - Pat Kirkwood always denied an affair with Philip. And for now, the palace kept the lid on any tittle tattle. - No one could ever stand up any story about Philip's infidelity. There was never any credible evidence. So as an editor and a journalist, what you did was to say, 'Well, it's natural. That's who he is.' - With Philip's reported behaviour both in and out of the palace raising eyebrows, the first years of the Queen's reign had seemed a bumpy ride. And by 1954, perhaps the strain was starting to show. (FANFARE) Four months into a Commonwealth tour, an Australian film crew witnessed an unguarded moment between Elizabeth and Philip. - They were spending the night in a private little house, and the film crew were waiting outside. - The cameramen who were officially recording the events saw Prince Philip ducking out of the cabin where he and the Queen were living followed by a thrown tennis racket and right after that a clearly furious queen. - The film crew, of course, caught all this on film, and the Queen's press secretary, witnessing this, thought, 'My goodness. This is absolutely flammable stuff.' - Threatening to have the crew arrested, the Queen's press secretary insisted they destroy the footage. Soon after, Elizabeth stepped out to thank them. - She said, 'Oh, thank you very much. I'm sorry for that little interlude. 'But, as you know, it happens in every marriage. 'Now, what would you like me to do?' - We all know that Prince Philip has a quick temper. And yet, when we hear of someone actually resorting to physical violence, (LAUGHS) it's the Queen. - Two years later, Philip embarked on another Commonwealth tour. But this time around, Elizabeth would not be joining her husband on his four-month trip. Was the pressure on the couple taking its toll? - He was very swift to get out of it as fast as he could, taking this tour of the Commonwealth on Britannia, escaping the marriage in such a blatant and obvious way for so long. - While Philip was away, the newspapers picked up on the story that his press secretary and travelling companion, Mike Parker, was being divorced for adultery. - The rumours started that his equerry had been having an affair and then that Prince Philip was having an affair or there was a sort of girl in every port, and like the other rumours, it would never go away. - In February 1957, an American newspaper was first to print the rumours of a rift in the royal marriage. Next, the British press picked up the story. - There's a sort of fevered press interest in Britain, all sorts of rumours about how the Prince has gone abroad to escape. - Obviously, these rumours got to the Queen. - With the so-called 'royal rift' now making headlines around the world, the palace took the unprecedented step of denying the rumours. - This was completely out of character to issue any sort of statement. - A public denial is tantamount to an admission. And, of course, it just fuelled speculation. - The floodgates were now open. Newspapers and biographers continue to this day to speculate about alleged infidelities, which the Prince has always denied. - I think that he was very clever at concealing it. And I think there was a complicity... in those who knew that it was OK as long as it remained that way, that it was not too dangerous. - Whatever was happening in her marriage, for Elizabeth, failure was not an option. - I think divorce is almost unthinkable as far as the Queen is concerned. There was nothing very much that she could have done except, I think, look the other way. And if there were affairs, that's obviously precisely what she did. - Even if the worst suspicions of the establishment had been fulfilled, by the standards of the 1950s aristocracy, this would not necessarily have been regarded as the end of the road for a marriage. You expected loyalty from your spouse. You didn't necessarily expect total sexual fidelity. - Elizabeth's marriage had been transformed by her accession to the throne. Now a new family rupture would also test the Queen as a sister. Elizabeth and her sister, Margaret, had grown up in a close-knit family nicknamed 'us four'. - Every film of the royal family tells the same story, the story of a happy and united family. - The Queen and Margaret were always very, very close. Margaret was some somebody that lit up Elizabeth's life and always had done, and they were the only two people that knew, really, what it was like to be who they were. - The death of their father, George VI, had shifted the dynamic between the sisters. - Suddenly, Elizabeth was the indisputable head of the family. What she said mattered more than what their mother said. And I think Margaret found that very difficult. - Just over a year into the Queen's reign, a very public crisis would force her to choose between family or duty. In 1953, the 23-year-old Margaret told the Queen she planned to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend, a Battle of Britain pilot turned royal aide. But Margaret's position in the royal family met she needed her sister's permission to go ahead. - This takes us right back to all the issues of the application once again because Peter Townsend is a divorced man, and the Queen is head of the church, and the church at this time does not allow divorced people to remarry. - Whilst the church and government were against the marriage, the public were for it. In the middle was Elizabeth. The Queen now faced an unenviable choice ` compromise her position as head of the church or deny her sister's happiness. - She was still very new in the job, and she was being asked to make a choice between duty and family. - She loved her sister. She didn't want to thwart her sister. She wanted happiness for her sister. So she was torn, I think. - Unable to sanction the marriage, the Queen played for time. - She could see there was a loophole. When Margaret reached the age of 25, she no longer needed the Queen's permission to marry, so I think she urged her sister to wait. - Townsend was posted to Brussels, away from the Princess. But two years later, as Margaret's 25th birthday approached, it was decision time. The couple's still needed permission to marry, this time from the government. These declassified government documents reveal a secret deal struck by the Prime Minister, Anthony Eden. - They've really created a compromise, and the compromise is that Margaret could marry Townsend and she keeps her title and she keeps her civil list allowance but she doesn't keep her line in the succession. - The Queen has often been perceived as having thwarted Margaret's marriage, but these documents reveal that, far from blocking the marriage... - Her Majesty would not wish to stand in the way of her sister's happiness. - I think we really see in these documents how hard the Queen tries for Margaret, and it gives us a different view of the Queen, of someone who did try and put her sister's happiness, really, as a top priority. So what this does is it puts the decision on Margaret. - So what does Margaret do? This letter from Margaret to the Prime Minister, written the week before her birthday and kept classified for nearly 50 years, reveals that the Princess's mind was far from made up. - I have no doubt that during this time, especially on my birthday, the press would encourage every sort of speculation about the possibility of my marrying Group Captain Peter Townsend, but it is only by seeing him that I feel I can properly decide whether I can marry him or not. - Princess Margaret is putting her foot on the brake and saying, 'Let's have another think before we take the step of marriage.' - After reuniting with Townsend, amid a press frenzy, Margaret announced that she would not marry him. - I think this throws a whole new light on the affair. We've always believed that she didn't marry Townsend because she was prevented by the government, by the Church of England, and by her sister, but this very much suggests that actually she didn't actually love him enough. (UPBEAT MUSIC) - The 1950s had proved a challenging decade for the Queen, but by 1960, there was a new spirit of optimism in the air. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan told the country we had never had it so good. Princess Margaret had found love again. And Elizabeth and Philip also had happy news to share ` the birth of their son, Andrew. But the new arrival had reopened an old argument as once again Philip pushed for the family to take his name. - She's really keen to do something to keep Philip happy over this. She really cares about it, and possibly he was giving her rather a hard time. - Eight years earlier, the inexperienced monarch had been led by her veteran prime minister, Winston Churchill. This time around, and with Churchill long gone, would she be able to put Philip first? - It is extraordinary, if you think about it, that both Macmillan and the Home Secretary go to see the Queen about the name change problem. Both come away, themselves distressed about the degree of the Queen's distress that she's suffering from being bombarded, brutally bombarded, Philip in a tantrum, an angry tantrum, saying, 'Why won't you give me this bloody name?' - Elizabeth was now set on changing her children's name. And this time, Her Majesty's Government agreed. Children outside the direct line of succession would now be called Mountbatten-Windsor. - When Churchill said no, she kept her powder dry. And when Macmillan came into power, she exerted more influence about that, and she got the name changed. - I think two things are happening in the '60s. You get the settlement, the name dispute, and also they're getting older. They're slowing down. He's slowing down. And the strength of their relationship are as apparent as the weaknesses. - By the mid '60s, the Queen was once again the mother of young children. And with over a decade on the throne, the now seasoned monarch was able to take a different approach. - I think parenting had changed in the '60s. I think that maybe the Queen was a more relaxed person with more time on her hands. I think Andrew and Edward are almost like a second family, and there's a chance to be warmer and closer. - Front of House, Philip played the supporting role. But within the family, the Queen placed him in charge. - The Queen had old-fashioned ideas about, you know, the husband ruling the roost, and that accounts, I think, for the fact that Prince Charles had such a miserable upbringing. - A key parental decision was where the heir to the throne should go to school. - Prince Philip wants to do something modern and something different. He believes that his own education at Gordonstoun has been extremely successful, so he wants to send his son there. This is opposed by the Queen Mother, who thinks, probably rightly in this case, that Eton would have been a better school for Prince Charles. And once more, the Queen is in the middle. - To side with her mother would mean undermining Philip's position as the head of the family. Which way would the Queen turn? - Now Jeff Shelley reporting on Gordonstoun as Prince Charles arrives with his father, the school's most famous old boy. - Philip thought it would toughen Charles up, it would be a great preparation, make a man of him, and all this kind of thing. I think, in some ways, obviously, it had the opposite effect. - He found the physical aspects of the school really quite hard, I think. He was bullied. He was lonely. He was friendless. He was miserable. - I think it contributed to this feeling that Charles didn't quite fit, that he was a square peg in a round hole and always would be. - The Queen's constantly frustrated with Charles. She's never really understood him, and she's puzzled by him, and that's why she's, to this day, more openly affectionate towards Andrew and more forgiving towards Andrew than she is towards Charles. - Royal observers were struck by the difference between the brothers. - Andrew is polar opposite to Charles. He's noisy. He's bumptious. Very charming when he wants to be. He can be arrogant and rude. I suppose he has some characteristics of his own father. - Charles had a much better intellect than Andrew. I think Andrew is a few sandwiches short of a picnic in terms of intellect. - Like his father, Andrew saw active service in the navy, piloting helicopters during the Falklands War. - For a time, when he came back, he was like a war hero. Everyone thought he was just wonderful. And I think the Queen was very proud of her son indeed. - As first and second in line to the throne, Charles and Andrew represented the future of the monarchy. But soon, scandals surrounding the princes would damage the institution their mother had worked so hard to secure. (DRAMATIC MUSIC) Family values had been at the heart of the royal brand as Elizabeth steered the monarchy away from the damage of the abdication. And as the Queen's children settled down, royal weddings were once again national celebrations. - For her, the idealised family that the monarchy represents is not just a kind of PR concoction. She believes in it. She's very religious. She's sort of a conservative person. She's a family person. - The public collapse of three of her children's marriages threw the royals' image into turmoil. - She talked about the sanctity of the family. The moment she starts talking about the sanctity of the family, the whole family falls apart and is divorcing and toe sucking and wanting to come back as a tampon and all these frightful things. It must have caused her almost unimaginable anguish. - 1992, the year the Queen was to dub her annus horribilis, saw Princess Anne divorce and both Charles and Andrew separate. - There are now just 24 hours to go before the book which claims to expose serious rifts in her marriage goes on sale. - But as heir to the throne, the public collapse of Charles's marriage was most damaging of all. - I think that Charles' marriage was destined to fail almost from the start because there was such an obvious incompatibility. Moreover, there was somebody waiting in the wings to be Mrs Charles Number 2. - The deferential press of the 1950s was no more. Now the tabloids covered Charles's affair with Camilla in lurid detail. And after he publicly admitted adultery, one opinion poll found that two-thirds of the public felt the prince's behaviour made him unfit to be king. - It is legitimate to ask, I think, whether, if you are divorced, is it an impediment to you fulfilling your duty, as you might have to do, as king? - I don't see why it should be an impediment. But that's the way I look at it. I wouldn't have thought so, no. - The Queen was confronted with a stark choice ` allow the escalating conflict between Charles and Diana to damage the monarchy or consider the once unthinkable, a divorced future king. - The Queen's sort of raison d'etre was to keep the monarchy together by preventing the spectre of divorce from rearing its ugly head, as it had done in 1936. And late in life, she finds that she's surrounded by divorce. Her sister's divorced. Her daughter is divorced. The Duke of York is divorced. - But around the Queen, the country was changing. The four decades of her reign had seen Britain's divorce laws liberalise and cases rise, peaking in 1994, the year that Charles admitted adultery. In December 1995, with her son's public approval ratings plummeting, the Queen made a decisive intervention and told Charles and Diana to divorce. - It was left to the Queen to actually seek the initiative herself. And I think probably most people think it was very courageous and the right thing to do. - She had seen such... such damage being done to the whole institution by this terrible 'war of the Waleses' which was being played out in the tabloid press that divorce really was the only way to stop that war. The Queen's priority was the safety of the monarchy. - I think the royal family has moved with the times, and divorce, if not the norm, is something which is perfectly acceptable, not least because the Church of England's attitude has changed to it. - Throughout her adult life, the Queen had prioritised duty. To some, it looked like her family was paying the price. - There is this sort of argument, isn't there, that the Queen took her eye off the ball, but what that, I always think, fails to recognise is that no parent in the world controls their children's love life. - She did say, I think, to the Queen Mother once, when all her children's marriages were ending in divorce, 'Where have I gone wrong?' And I think the Queen Mother said, 'Darling, there's nothing you can do. It's another generation.' - Family crises have continued to test the Queen as Harry and Meghan exited royal duties and Prince Andrew gave a disastrous interview over his association with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. - This is something huge. This is actual being caught up in criminal proceedings. And so the Queen has to take firm and decisive action. She is his mother, but she's also head of the royal family. - With Andrew under pressure to speak to US investigators, once again, the Queen had a call to make; would she act as mother or as monarch? - The Queen took a decision very early on that Andrew must step back from royal duties. And then she went riding with him the next day, so she was saying to the world, 'He's still my son, 'but he's no longer fit to work for this institution.' - After nearly 70 years on the throne, the Queen's own marriage remains her bedrock. - I think the achievement of Prince Philip over the long term was to make that role of consort a really important role. And I think that without Philip, it would have been really hard for her to do what she's done. - Celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary in 1997, she described him as her strength and stay all these years, and Philip offered his tribute in return. - I think that the main lesson that we've learned is that tolerance is the one essential ingredient of any happy marriage. It may not be quite so important when things are going well, but it is absolutely vital when things get difficult. And you can take it from me that the Queen has the quality of tolerance in abundance. (LAUGHTER) - The Queen has navigated a lifetime of tough choices between family and duty to emerge as one of the most revered figures of the modern age. But perhaps her ultimate test will be her legacy and whether the family she's raised will succeed in securing the institution Elizabeth has devoted her life to. - The Queen has this very clear, dedicated sense of duty. And all those around her never measure up to that at any point. Her own family has not measured up to that. Charles never measured up to that. I think you have to go to William to find somebody who seems to have that same sense of what it means. - There will be more scandals to come. They will never end. But that's part of the story. That's part of the brand. And if they're sensible, they have somebody there in Buckingham Palace who says, 'Guys, we've been through worse. We've seen it all before.' Even Prince Andrew, even Meghan, I mean, that's nothing. It's nothing compared with what they've been through before and what they'll probably see in the future. Captions by Able. Captions were made with support from NZ On Air.