She will always be his guiding light

Prince Charles's love and consuming feeling of loss were written large in his every expression. Kings in waiting are not supposed to cry, but the Prince was close to tears as he delivered his tribute to "my darling grandmother".

"I adored her," he said. It was a simple statement, but it was drawn from the bottom of his heart. The Queen Mother and the grandson who will one day be head of the family she did so much to shape were bound together by an affection which bordered on passion. She was the mother he always wanted - and he was the son she never had.

The idea of life without her is something he can barely bring himself to contemplate. The Queen Mother has been the pervasive influence in the monarchy all his life. It is to her that everyone, including her daughter the Queen, always deferred to. But now the baton of royalty has been passed and it is Charles who must carry it forward.

It is a prospect he finds challenging. It is, after all, what he has been trained for and it was notable that it was Charles and not the Queen who delivered yesterday's eulogy.

The Queen has never been good at showing her emotions. She belongs to the tightly-buttoned lip tradition of royalty. As far as she is concerned, emotions are private, and always have been. The only exception was her address following the death of Princess Diana - and then only because her advisers insisted.

Charles has learned to be more open about his feelings - a notable legacy from his marriage to Diana. He wanted to say something about his grandmother. And the fact that he did is an indication of his increasing authority within the royal family.

To talk so publicly about the Queen Mother's death was none-the-less a daunting experience for the Prince. She had reached the grand old age of 101 but, as the look of anguish in his face made plain, he wished her to go on for ever.

"For me, she meant everything and I had dreaded, dreaded this moment along with, I know, countless others. Somehow I never thought it would come."

As he spoke those words, you could hear the grief in his voice. He was sitting in the Orchard Room at Highgrove with two photographs of the Queen Mother at his side. His eyes kept darting away and it clearly required a supreme act of selfrestraint for him to hold his tears in check. She was the example and the comfort he always turned to.

Now he is on his own - and it showed.

"She was quite simply the most magical grandmother you could possibly have," he continued, "and I was utterly devoted to her."

And she to him. From the earliest age, Charles was drawn by her warmth and femininity. As a mother, the Queen Mother had been withdrawn and aloof. As a grandmother, however, she was able to relax and give of herself in a manner her grandson found irresistible. That was just as well, for when Charles was young he saw little of his parents.

His father, Prince Philip, was a serving naval officer when Charles was born and took a very brusque approach to fatherhood. Asked what his newborn son reminded him of, he replied: "A plum pudding."

Philip's off-hand manner was never going to bring the best out of his son. As the Prince's old gover ness, Catherine Peebles, observed: "Charles liked being amused rather than amusing himself. He was very responsive to kindness, but if you shouted at him he would draw back into his shell and you would be able to do nothing with him." Philip did a lot of shouting and relations between father and son were never the closest.

His mother, too, was a remote figure. When he was four years old she became his Queen as well as his mother and it was that new role that engaged most of her energy. It left her little time to devote to the sensitive, little boy desperate for affection.

"Charles worshipped his mother but from afar," said the late novelist Barbara Cartland, whose daughter, Raine, was married to Princess Diana's father.

It was with the Queen Mother that he found the attention he needed. He spent months on end in her care while his parents were away on royal duties and she positively doted on him. She described him as "a very gentle boy with a very kind heart which I think is the essence of everything".

It was the beginning of a relationship which will define the future of the British monarchy.

The Queen, for her part, has been forced by economic strictures and a dramatic shift in public opinion, to cut back on the traditional trappings of royalty. The royal yacht has gone, the royal train is in doubt and there has been a huge clear-out of staff.

If Prince Philip had had his way the reforms would have been even more swingeing. He was forever urging the royal family to "modernise", which to his way of thinking meant dispensing with many of the old protocols and rituals.

There was only so far Philip could go, however. The Queen Mother had very firm ideas about how royalty should present itself. She believed in pomp and ceremony. And she used her time they spent together to impart those ideas to Charles.

Like his grandmother, he lives in sumptuous state. The Queen Mother had an entourage of 40 servants. The Prince of Wales employs more than 70. And, following the example of his grandmother, he likes to entertain lavishly.

It was the Queen Mother who first started inviting actors and writers to dinner at Royal Lodge and Clarence House where everyone was expected to sing (often literally) for their supper.

Charles has taken up the idea and now holds regular house parties at Sandringham where the guest list will include the likes of actors Stephen Fry, Edward Fox and Gosford-Park's Richard E. Grant, author and playwright John Mortimer and musician Jools Holland. When Charles is entertaining at Sandringham that dour and unwelcoming Victorian pile is transformed into a Edwardian pleasure dome. The wines are always of the finest and each day brings new arrangements of fresh flowers and floral displays. He sees little change out of £20,000 - just for one weekend.

"Mummy would not approve," he admitted.

His grandmother, on the other hand, most decidedly did. The Queen Mother firmly believed that if you do something you must do it properly - and in full royal style.

The Queen runs what by royal traditional standards is almost a utilitarian household. When she is at Sandringham, for instance, she has the same potted plant on the table for the whole weekend. That was not the Queen Mother's way. Nor is it Prince Charles's. It is his grandmother's and not the Queen's example he is so clearly determined to follow. And by implanting her notions of how royalty should present itself, the Queen Mother has ensured that it is her vision of the monarchy that will survive into the next reign.

Despite their shared interests, Charles and his grandmother did not always see eye to eye, however.

There was no question of Charles marrying Camilla while the Queen Mother was alive. She may have been an old lady, but her authority within the royal family was still supreme and neither the Queen nor Prince Charles would have wanted to confront her displeasure.

The situation has changed - but only up to a point. Public opinion, if the polls are accurate, may now be prepared to accept Camilla as Charles's wife. They are, after all, two middle-aged people who are entitled to their happiness.

What the nation Charles was born to reign over is not prepared to countenance, however, is Camilla as Queen. The Queen Mother, with her unerring instinct for what was royally right, knew that. She liked Camilla, but that was not the point. Her priority was always the monarchy and she knew what was possible - and what was not. As Charles himself pointed out: "Above all, she understood the British character."

It is a lesson that Charles will have absorbed. The Queen, however, has always been much more pliable than her mother and, with the Queen Mother gone, we will undoubtedly be seeing more of Camilla in the semi-official role as Charles's consort in the months to come.

Marriage, though, is not on the immediate agenda. The Queen Mother would not have approved and that is as important to the Prince now as it was when she was alive.

It is the joy, not her disapproval, that Charles has chosen to remember, however. He said: "She saw the funny side of life and we laughed until we cried. Oh, how I shall miss her laugh and her wonderful wisdom born of such experience and an innate sensitivity to life. Her departure has left an irreplaceable chasm in countless lives."

It has also brought his own mortality into focus. As he said, his grandfather, King George VI, "died when he was only two-and-a-half years older than I am".

The Prince of Wales is now 53. With his grandmother gone and his mother moving gracefully into old age, he knows that the future of the monarchy is weighing ever more heavily on his shoulders. He is determined to live up to his responsibilities - as his grandmother would have wished. And it is the example of her tireless dedication to duty that guides him.