As if all of that wasn’t enough, on 20 July the IRA detonated 25lb of high explosive from a blue Austin car parked in the South Carriage Drive of Hyde Park just as the Household Cavalry Blues and Royals rode past. The blast killed three soldiers and injured a further twenty-three, but the horses took the worst of it and seven were killed or so badly injured they had to be destroyed. One of the horses, Sefton, had an eight-hour operation; survived his thirty-four injuries to become a national icon and symbol of the appalling tragedy. That night the watchman outside the Queen’s door said he heard Her Majesty saying repeatedly: ‘The horses, the poor horses . . .’ Two hours after the first attack, there was a second blast underneath the bandstand where the regiment of the Royal Green Jackets were playing to a crowd of over a hundred onlookers. The final death toll was eleven and over fifty were injured.

Where royalty is concerned, the show must go on and on 4 August, with her smile fixed firmly in place, the Queen attended the christening of the heir presumptive in the Music Room of Buckingham Palace. Diana was not at her most supportive and resented the attention being focused on the Queen Mother, who was celebrating her eighty-second birthday. She said she felt ‘excluded totally’, and little William Arthur Philip Louis, sensing his mother’s distress, cried throughout.

That significant family moment, with four generations of the royal family gathered together, highlighted the big changes that were occurring within the Queen’s own family and their difficulties in adapting to the times. They were still expected to be royal and behave like royalty, and at the same time people wanted them to be ordinary enough to have a drink in a pub. They were no longer cocooned by a deferential press, but exposed and, indeed, overexposed. In an interview with the Observer newspaper, Prince Philip tried to explain what it was like living above ‘the shop’ at Buckingham Palace. ‘We didn’t choose this house, we didn’t build this house, we simply occupy it like a tortoise occupies a shell,’ he said firmly. ‘We go to state occasions all dressed up but we wouldn’t dress up like that if the occasion were not a state occasion – the state occasions are part of the living theatre of the monarchy. People expect us to be all things to all men and to all kinds at all times.’