NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The #1 New York Times bestselling author of William and Kate and The Day Diana Died takes a compulsively readable look into the relationships and rivalries of Queen Elizabeth, Camilla Parker Bowles, and Kate Middleton. One has been famous longer than anyone on the planet—a wily stateswoman and an enduring symbol of a fading institution. One is the great-granddaughter of a king’s mistress and a celebrated homewrecker who survived a firestorm of scorn to marry her lover and replace her arch rival, a beloved twentieth-century figure. One is a beautiful commoner, the university-educated daughter of a self-made entrepreneur, a fashion idol, and wife and mother to two future kings. Master biographer Christopher Andersen takes readers behind palace walls to examine the surprising similarities and stark differences among three remarkable women—Queen Elizabeth; Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall; and Princess Kate. Andersen reveals what transpires within the royal family away from the public's prying eyes; how the women actually feel about each other; how they differ as lovers, wives, and mothers; and how they are reshaping the landscape of the monarchy in this addictive read that will shock even those who are spellbound by the royal palace. "[Combines] the scholarship of a dissertation with the dishyness of a tabloid.Readers will feel like a palace insider... With gasp-worthy and laugh-out-loud moments revealing scandalous and sympathetic details of the royal family, Andersen humanizes this privileged yet embattled group." -- Kirkus "Catnip for royal watchers." -- Vanity Fair Christopher Andersen is the critically acclaimed author of eighteen New York Times bestsellers which have been translated into more than twenty-five languages worldwide. Two of his books— The Day Diana Died and The Day John Died (about JFK Jr.)—reached #1. A former contributing editor of Time and longtime senior editor of People , Andersen has also written hundreds of articles for a wide range of publications, including The New York Times , Life , and Vanity Fair . Andersen has appeared frequently on such programs as Today , Good Morning America , NBC Nightly News , CBS This Morning , 20/20 , Anderson Cooper 360 , Dateline NBC , Access Hollywood , Entertainment Tonight , Inside Edition , 48 Hours , and more. Preface BLACK QUEEN, WHITE QUEEN They are all straight out of a storybook: the beloved queen trying to hold her family and her realm together; the brooding, philandering, driven heir impatient for the throne; the beautiful, doomed wife; the scheming mistress with ambitions of her own; the upstanding younger prince, and his enchanting young wife and children. These and hundreds of other colorful characters spread out over the centuries have made Britain’s Royal Family the world’s most riveting, glamorous, critically acclaimed, and longest-running reality show. Presiding over it all is a woman whose full title is “Elizabeth II, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her Other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith.” Even this grand appellation does not fully describe the spell she casts on her subjects; recent studies show that at least one-third of all Britons regularly dream about the Queen. In many of these dreams, Her Majesty has dropped by for a cup of tea, and merely wants to chat with a “normal person” about how difficult it is to raise a family as egregiously problematic as hers. Now, as she celebrates her ninetieth birthday, the woman who is both the oldest and longest-reigning of all British monarchs quietly plans her exit. In his hit play King Charles III , Mike Bartlett imagines a future King Charles refusing to give royal assent to a bill restricting press freedom (difficult to imagine given Charles’s storied contempt for journalists) and then abruptly dissolving Parliament. A constitutional crisis ensues, there are protests in the streets, and the Duchess of Cambridge hatches a plan that will eventually lead to Charles’s forced abdication. While the plot seemed far-fetched at first, Britons were shocked to learn in 2013 that both the Queen’s and Prince Charles’s powers were far from merely ceremonial, as had long been believed. In dozens of instances, both the monarch and her heir secretly threatened to withhold royal assent—a stamp of approval to legislation that was assumed to be automatically given—as a means of altering bills or vetoing them altogether. Pointing out that the British people had always been led to believe these powers were “quaint and sweet,” legal scholar John Kirhope said it was clear that the Queen and her son wielded “real influence and real power, albeit unaccountable.” Her Majesty, true to form, remained above the fray until the initial furor over the extent of her true power—and more important, that of her decidedly less popular heir—subsided. In t