During her first Commonwealth tour of Australia in 1954, the Queen was welcomed with great warmth and enthusiasm. With her handsome and cheerful husband at her side, they were the picture of a truly romantic couple and heralded a brighter and more successful future. But, despite the success of the trip, there were times when it became overwhelming. She came from a very sheltered background and she remained painfully shy. She was still only twenty-eight, in a distant land, and her children and her family were half a world away. She had been Queen for only two years and the responsibility still terrified and confused her.

She was head of a great and venerable institution and, by her way of thinking, it would have been an egotistical abjuration of a sacred obligation to surrender to self-doubt. But with Philip by her side, she felt she would always be able to cope. He made her see the funny side of situations, and he was often the only person she could talk to in a superficial vein about what they had seen and done; she didn’t have to be on her guard with him, worrying in case she might say the wrong thing, or create the wrong impression that would provoke a minor controversy. He gave her some much-needed courage when she was meeting the hundreds of people who were waiting for her. Sometimes he could be brusque, sometimes he made what became known as his gaffes – but they were often his way of relieving the tension. What was important was that he always managed to make her laugh as they faced the tedium, pitfalls and difficulties of royal duties together. In short, they learned how to work together to overcome the normal type of obstacles and challenges that life in the public eye threw up, but this sort of experience – honed through the following decades – was not going to be sufficient in 1992.

For all that their lives were extremely comfortable, there were also some major and very personal issues to deal with early on. The troubles had started immediately after the Coronation, when the British press picked up on Princess Margaret brushing an imaginary bit of fluff off Group Captain Peter Townsend’s uniform. This tiny but intimate gesture was noticed, and people immediately recognised the significance of it. Townsend had been an RAF pilot during the war, before moving to work in the royal household in 1944. What made the whole thing more significant was that Townsend had recently divorced his wife, and in those days that was deemed to be beyond the pale in polite society – especially when a member of the royal family was involved.