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her annual Honors List. This list, submitted by the Prime Minister but always subject to the approval of the sovereign (with added guidance from the Men in Gray), bestows MBEs (Members of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire), OBEs (Officers of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire), CBEs (Commanders of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire), and knighthoods on a thousand or more artists, academics, civil servants, scientists, diplomats, politicians, business leaders, and humanitarians. By 2016, the Queen had conferred on her subjects more than four hundred thousand honors and awards.
    No less for members of the Royal Family, Trooping the Colour affords the opportunity to gauge where one stands in the eyes of the monarch—and in the royal pecking order. During the Golden Jubilee celebrations in 2002 celebrating the Queen’s fiftieth year on the throne, Her Majesty allowed Camilla to be seen publicly with the Royal Family for the first time—with some important restrictions. At the classical and pop concerts held at Buckingham Palace that year, Camilla could be viewed on the giant Jumbotron, nervously playing with her hair and trying to spy on what Charles and the Queen—Her Majesty’s bright yellow earplugs firmly in place—were up to from two rows behind.
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    THINGS WERE VERY DIFFERENT DURING the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee a decade later. Eyebrows raised when Prince Philip washospitalized with a bladder infection and, rather than going solo as she usually did under such circumstances, the Queen chose Camilla to take his place next to her in the royal carriage. “She was sending a very strong message,” observed longtime royal commentator Robert Jobson, “that the Duchess of Cornwall deserved to be there.” Camilla, more stunned than anyone at that turn of events, could scarcely contain her glee.
    Camilla’s good fortune—“pride of place next to the queen,” the Times of London called it—was no accident. For years now, Charles had pleaded with his mother to make a more public show of her acceptance of Camilla, however grudging it might have been. When his father fell ill, he wasted no time in pressuring the Queen to invite Camilla to sit next to her in the 1902 State Landau. Even more important than his personal entreaties to the Queen herself was the deft lobbying with senior Buckingham Palace officials undertaken by Charles’s staff on Camilla’s behalf. In matters of protocol, the Queen almost always acquiesced, albeit sometimes reluctantly, to the Men in Gray.
    The situation regarding Philip was back to normal in 2013, when the ninety-four-year-old Duke of Edinburgh not only rode next to his wife in the royal carriage, but did it wearing the full uniform and unwieldy bearskin hat of the Grenadier Guards. This was particularly impressive given the fact that Philip now officially ranked as the oldest living male member of the British Royal Family—ever. Camilla and Kate actually rode side by side in a separate carriage with Prince Harry, unsmiling and clearly ill at ease as they waved stiffly to crowds lining the streets.
    Whether the Queen is again convinced to publicly sidle up to her daughter-in-law as she did during the Diamond Jubilee or decides to give another Royal the nod, Camilla must look aspolished and presentable as humanly possible for the occasion. To say she had undergone a Galatea-like transformation in recent years would be a gross understatement. For decades, Camilla’s fashion sense was akin to her taste in furniture—decidedly English shabby. She favored torn riding pants or dirt-stained jeans, boxy sweaters, scuffed, mud-caked boots, frayed scarves, and frumpy tweeds. Her fingernails were dirty and jagged, her crooked and chipped teeth stained by decades of smoking. Her hair was a brittle tangle of straw, from which one might at any given moment pull out an actual piece of straw.
    That began to change dramatically in late 2002, when, at Charles’s