When I was growing up in Australia (a country that was in the Commonwealth, and still is) in the 1970s, the British royal family, and Queen Elizabeth II in particular, held a magnetic allure. Life for them (as observed by we mere ‘peasants’ in heat-driven and perpetually sunny Antipodean climes in Australia) looked to be a sublime fairytale. The royal family were living a life of undeniable good fortune and it seemed they could not put a foot wrong. Much of their lives were hidden from the public, so we were mainly privy to the family’s victories and attributes and not their failings and mis-steps..

Such was this country’s love for the Queen and the royal family in my childhood that in 1977 (the year of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, marking 25 years since she had ascended the throne in 1952, when she was a youthful 25 years old) when I was ten years old, my mother took my sisters and I out of school to stand on a jaded street corner on a sultry Brisbane autumn day to cheer our hearts out and wave as the Queen was driven past in a fancy car. I can still remember her waving. It was a great thrill. We were taught growing up that she was really ‘somebody’, a person to be revered, admired and respected.

Similarly, when the then Prince Charles and Princess Diana visited Australia in 1983, my mother, my best friend and I stood outside Government House in Brisbane when the royal couple emerged from the gates in a car one night. The inside of the car was lit up so we got a great glimpse of Princess Diana as she was driven past. She really did look like a princess from another time – ethereally beautiful and classy.

It was as if we, the Queen’s subjects, wanted some of her and her family’s glittering magic to rub off on us. We knew we could never belong to the world of the royal family, but maybe their exceedingly good luck (to be born into such privilege and wealth where one’s every whim, no matter how trivial, was dutifully seen to by palace servants and staff that daily served the royal family and were always in their lives’, but forever separated from them by class and status in life) could somehow rub off on us.

So much has changed. With social media and royals and ‘palace sources’ revealing to the public-at-large across the world many sordid secrets of the British royal family (Prince Harry’s highly explosive recent memoir, Spare, and his and wife, Meghan’s, revelatory interview with Oprah come to mind), we no longer see them as ‘living the dream’, or as being other-worldly, or not as much.  In fact we find them both enviable and unenviable at the same time. They are a family with problems, like the ‘commoners’ in their realm and throughout the world. In other words, they are human beings. Albeit ones who are living in a vehemently privileged and (?) blessed world.

Such truths are superbly explored and examined in stellar Australian author, Rebecca Armitage’s, soaring debut novel, The Heir Apparent.

Dr Lexi Villiers is 29 years old and living a life that she adores and is proud of. She works long but rewarding hours at a hospital in Hobart as a registrar. Her fault is that she maybe cares too much for her patients, and thinks about them after they have been discharged from the hospital. Lexi also enjoys going out to pubs and clubs with friends, and worries about money just like many in society.  Living on a vineyard out of Hobart, with housemates Jack (who runs the vineyard) and Finn (a fellow registrar at the hospital), life seems to be close to perfect for Lexi. Or is it? 

Because there is one not-so-tiny glitch in Lexi’s seemingly well-ordered life. She is hounded by photographers and has some awful things written about her. This is because Lexi is actually Princess Alexandrina and is thus (by fortune or misfortune of birth, whichever way you look at it) “third in line to the British throne”. Her grandmother (her father, Prince Frederick’s, mother) is Queen Eleanor, the Queen of England and the Commonwealth. Prince Frederick is due to become King when the Queen passes, and Prince Louis (Lexi’s twin brother) is to become King, and his wife Amira, Queen, when Frederick passes.

Then a terrible accident changes Lexi’s life forever. After Christmas, at the end of 2022, Prince Frederick, Prince Louis and Louis’s best friend, Kris, are skiing in Switzerland when they are caught up in a monstrous avalanche. All three die.

So when Lexi is camping with Jack and Finn on Maria Island in the east of Tasmania on New Year’s Day in 2023, it startles Lexi somewhat when a helicopter lands on the island near her (just as she and Jack are about to kiss) and Stewart, the Queen’s private secretary for the last 30 years emerges from it.

Because of the accident in Switzerland, and because Lexi is now Queen-in-Waiting by virtue of when she was born, she is to fly back to London immediately with Stewart. But Lexi had fled from England some nine years previously and hadn’t been in proper contact with her father and brother for some time. She had been painted in the press in a somewhat negative light. As Lexi reflects to herself, “I was still a pariah in the House of Villiers”.

Once in London, Mary Williams is assigned as Lexi’s private secretary. Lexi thinks to herself, “She (Mary) had the mousy look of most female palace aides. They were all white; they were all rich. With her (Mary’s) featureless blonde face, she could have been pure aristocracy. Her family must have been somewhere further down the food chain, but high enough that a (21 000 pounds) palace salary covered her tab at the Twenty Two Hotel while she lived off a generous trust”. Mary proves to be indispensable to Lexi, or is she?

Soon Lexi is meeting with the Queen and the Prime Minister, Jenny Walsh. Jenny seems trustworthy and dependable, or is she?

There are eyes and ears on Lexi from all corners, and all social tiers, at the palace. People spying on her, waiting for her to put a foot wrong (particularly her father’s brother, the nasty and conniving Prince Richard, who gets his staff to ‘give’ false stories about Lexi to the media).

The ‘men and women in grey suits’ (palace aides) who orchestrate the royal family’s every appointment and appearance (such as going to hospitals, schools, garden parties and charity events) and outfit loiter around the palace and other royal residences and plot and plan what will happen (including leaking both truths and falsehoods about royal family members to the media pack who greedily gobble up any crumb of information on the family) to family members. In fact their staff control the royal family to such a degree and it is such an ingrained part of their lives that many in the family seem almost oblivious to how chain-like it is. Lexi, having been away from it all for so long, sees it all with ‘fresh eyes’.

Lexi thinks, “The thing about being an aristocrat is that you meet very few people…..With our garden parties and investitures, the royal family is unique in brushing up against the masses. But the ranks of nobility below us are cloistered in a suffocating circle of exclusivity……From nursery schools to pony clubs, through to Eton and the Bullingdon, a small batch of people enriched by the transatlantic slave trade, generous inheritance taxes and colonial robbery rise together. They play together, they study together, they marry each other, and then they have children together, braiding the gilded threads of this community even tighter”.

Lexi has a year to decide whether she really wants to be Queen after her grandmother. And so we as readers are in for a year of much inner angst and deliberation by Lexi. Where is Jack when all this is going on? Will he fly to the United Kingdom to rescue Lexi? If he did, would he be an object of mockery by the royals or a unique object of interest, he being a quintessential Australian larrikin and straight-talker.

How did Lexi and Louis’s mother die? Was it really a drowning accident?

Lexi and Amira and Louis and Kris had been best friends at their terribly ‘posh’ school, Astley College. As school that “was co-ed, breathtakingly expensive and just forty-five minutes from the palace”. Lexi and Amira would have once died for each other, but can they still trust one another? Things are a bit frosty between the two of them now. What has Amira’s and Kris’s mother, Vikki, been scheming all these years? Was it a coincidence that her children ended up going to the same school as the royal twins and becoming the best of friends with them?

What is the terrible secret that Lexi has kept to herself for years? Are the Villiers a family of sinners, saints or somewhere in-between?

Is it Lexi’s unwavering destiny to be ‘Queen Alexandrina’ or Dr Lexi of Hobart? Where does her heart truly lie? Will Jack eventually be the King of England? Is that even possible?

The Heir Apparent was a cracker of a read. I found it hard to put down in fact. Despite being a republican (It is high time Australia became it’s own country and had an Australian head of state. King Charles III is the King of Australia), from childhood I have been fascinated with the royal family. I love seeing what Princess Catherine wears (she is so stylish!) and just think a lot of the family are lovely people who shine a light on many worthwhile causes. Prince William is working to eradicate homelessness in the United Kingdom for instance. His mother, Princess Diana, took him to homeless shelters as a child. I see King Charles, Queen Camilla, Prince William, Princess Catherine, Prince Harry and Meghan (despite not being working members of the royal family, Harry and Meghan still do so much good in the world) and Princess Anne as being lovely people who I would quite happily sit down with and have a cup of tea (using fine-bone china of course!) and chat with.

Rebecca has written a book that overflows with intelligence, wisdom and sharp insights into the human psyche and condition. She is a journalist who “has reported extensively on the royals” and her detailed descriptions of life as a royal and members of their staff reflect this. I loved reading of a world so far away physically and metaphorically from my own. A world I will never be a part of but can observe kindly from afar.

Bravo Rebecca! You have written a gem of a book that deserves a wide readership. The book was actually chosen by American actress Reese Witherspoon as one of her deserving book club picks.

I would say to that ten year old girl standing on a bright, sunny day on an Australian street corner in 1977, ‘ Enjoy waving to and cheering this lady, the Queen, who in many ways represents what is good and noble in this world. She has done her best. She has been loved greatly by many and given her love to many. She is among the best of a family far, far away. She is wonderful”.