What the Queen called ‘my second family’ was now complete. Being older, Philip was less demanding of Andrew and Edward than he had been with Charles, while the Queen had acquired the confidence of experience that enabled her to adopt a more relaxed and hands-on approach to motherhood. It showed with Andrew, but it showed even more with Edward. Andrew would always be his mother’s favourite, but Edward was also allowed to crawl around on the floor of her study while she worked on her state papers. Indeed, so intent was she to spend more time with her children that she brought her weekly meetings with her prime ministers forward by half an hour so she would be free to bathe Edward and put him to bed herself. Many working mothers have to adapt their diaries to accommodate children, and the Queen was doing just that so she could give as much attention as possible to both her family and her royal duties.

After the press rumours about Andrew, she also took the precaution of giving her subjects an early sight of the latest addition to her family and made a great show of bringing Edward out onto the Buckingham Palace balcony after Trooping the Colour in June, holding him aloft for the crowds below to see and cheer. As Philip observed: ‘We try to keep our children out of the public eye so that they can grow up as normally as possible. But if you are really going to have a monarchy, you have got to have a family and the family has got to be in the public eye.’

There was a limit to how far the Queen and her consort were prepared to go, however, down this path. Change is rarely in monarchy’s best interest. There is security in sameness; it is a bulwark against the agitations of social upheaval, and the 1960s were a very perturbing time indeed for the ancien regime. Outside the palace walls, a veritable social revolution was taking place, and by 1964 it was well underway. In Britain, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, the hereditary 14th Earl of Home, was swept from power by Harold Wilson and a Labour government dedicated to tearing down the old class barriers and building a modern, forward-looking society in their stead. In such a world, where Wilson was emphasising the ‘white heat of technology’, the monarchy was always going to appear out of date.