The rise of the royal he

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The tumult and the shouting over, the captains and the kings departed, where does the Queen Mother's death leave the monarchy now? In better shape than at any time since the death of Diana is the immediate answer - and perhaps in better shape since 1992 when Charles and Diana separated, since that poisonous bitterness at the heart of the Royal Family cast a pall of apprehension over all constitutionalists.

The Independent, gritting its teeth, published a frontpage poll earlier this week indicating that 84 per cent of Great Britain favours the continuation of the monarchy in some form, and 54 per cent wants nothing changed, not even the minor royals. This almost fairytale turnaround in the Royal Family's fortunes has been illustrated in the past few days by the crowds who gathered to see the old lady off: around 200,000 queuing to pass by her lying-in-state, and an estimated one million of them lining the route of the cortege from Westminster Abbey to Windsor Castle. They threw flowers at the hearse when the police weren't in the way, and clapped the Queen.

Yet we can now see that the departure of the Queen Mother gives a wholly different complexion to the House of Windsor. Almost overnight it has changed from being a matriarchy into a patriarchy. Until earlier this year, the combination of the Queen Mother and the Queen, and to a lesser extent her sister Margaret, lent our monarchy an aura of motherliness and femininity with which the British people have been familiar since the death of George VI half a century ago. Then at the funeral we were suddenly presented with the spectacle of an elderly Queen surrounded by men: Prince Philip, but also the Prince of Wales, William and Harry. No dependable motherliness and devotion to duty there, but something altogether more unpredictable.

Men especially find motherliness easy to accept, particularly in the old. Fatherliness is a much harder proposition. George VI was not loved for himself; in fact the first two-and-a-half years of his reign, before the royal couple went to the United States in 1939 and made a success of it, were extremely rocky. An American commentator wrote quite accurately before their US tour that a large part of the UK " still believes that Edward, Duke of Windsor, is the rightful owner of the British throne, and that King George VI is a colourless, weak personality largely on probation in the public mind of Great Britain". The war brought him popular esteem, but even then it was Queen Elizabeth who literally set the pace, breaking protocol by walking ahead of her tongue-tied husband at public engagements.

The last monarch who by the end was unreservedly adulated by most of her subjects was another elderly woman, Queen Victoria. George V, a good-hearted but limited man, was popular but remote from public opinion: a kindly, bearded profile on coins and postage stamps. If his father Edward VII had been living in the era of Rupert Murdoch and Kelvin MacKenzie, constant media assaults on his gambling and whoring would probably have brought down the monarchy, if they had not first hounded him from the succession.

This is the difficulty for Prince Charles and Prince William. Their lives are already under the kind of scrutiny which the Queen Mother never had to suffer - to the extent that, to this day, the well-attested fact that she was much keener on the idea of marrying the future Edward VIII than his younger brother Bertie scarcely ever surfaces. She outlived all her old friends, and although this must have been a source of sorrow to her, it did mean that there was nobody left to recall these small embarrassments she would sooner have had forgotten.

The Queen Mother's common touch, and her sense of theatre, which led her to plan her own funeral down to the smallest detail, meant that the country was happy to forgive her an extravagance which came from another age. But imagine the furore if, for the sake of argument, a future wife of Prince Charles demanded a retinue of 70 servants and could not move from one residence to another without taking her favourite linen and plate and pieces of furniture. Imagine such a wife racking up a £4 million overdraft and being forgiven for it by a nation which grudges the Queen the use of the Royal Train.

Now that all that has come to an end, the way is clear for the Queen to institute reforms which effectively decouple the minor royals from the immediate family. Grace-and-favour living in Kensington Palace will have to stop, and relatives like the Duke and Duchess of Kent will have to make their own way in the world, without royal status, unless they are prepared to give up all other paid employment and work solely for what George V called the Royal Firm. The same applies to the Earl and Countess of Wessex. It will place a greater responsibility upon the nucleus who are left, but clearing the undergrowth will make it easier to appreciate how much the Royal Family does to earn its privileges.

Officialdom declares, because it has to, that the Queen will never abdicate. Unofficialdom strongly suggests that Her Majesty is considering the possibility of passing the orb and sceptre to Prince Charles when she reaches the age of 80, in four years' time. This is not such a heresy as it might sound: two successive queens of the Netherlands have abdicated in favour of the younger generation, and taken on the mantle of Queen Mother, in a country which esteems motherliness just as we do.

Queen Elizabeth II does not possess her mother's theatricality; she never wanted to go on the stage as her mother did in her teens, and once complained sadly: "I work awfully hard, but Mummy has all the charm." Yet nobody can doubt the Queen's sterling sense of duty, and were the burden of kingship to be lifted from her shoulders she could provide the wisdom, the experience and, at a stretch, the motherliness, to offset King Charles's prickly nature and help him navigate the monarchy safely through whatever winds might blow.