Kitabı oxu: «Charles: Victim or villain?»

Dedication

To Jane

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

1 Death of a Princess

2 A Nation Mourns

3 The Young Prince

4 The Discovery of Diana

5 The Fairytale Fiancée

6 The Honeymoon Period

7 A State of Mind

8 The Offices of a Prince

9 Marriage and the Media: After Morton

10 The Beginning of the End

11 Camillagate

12 Difficulties at Work

13 Organic Highgrove

14 The Prince’s People

15 ‘Mrs PB’

16 Visions of the Monarchy

17 Charles and Camilla

18 Victim or Villain?

Epilogue

Index

Acknowledgements

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

Opinion polls suggest that the reputation of the Prince of Wales is beginning to recover after the emotional turmoil of Diana’s death in August 1997. It had not been good before she died, largely because of his relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles, but in the days that followed the fatal crash it plumbed new depths, as the nation’s anger at the loss of the Princess it loved so dearly turned on the monarchy and, more particularly, the heir to the throne. When Diana’s brother, Charles Spencer, gave his address at her funeral, and said that he would rescue her sons from the clutches of the Royal Family, the nation cheered – literally – as his voice was relayed to those inside and outside Westminster Abbey.

The Prince’s new-found popularity is no doubt gratifying, and has much to do with the way he has been seen to care for his children in the wake of their mother’s death. A significant percentage of the population would even sanction his marriage to Camilla Parker Bowles. However, a popular misconception undermines this growing acceptance: the belief that the Prince always loved Camilla and made no attempt during his years of marriage to Diana to shut his mistress out of his life.

Few would deny that it takes two to make a marriage, and two to break it. Yet millions of people the world over have been led to believe that the Prince of Wales destroyed his marriage, alone and unaided, because of his obsession with Mrs Parker Bowles. In 1992, Andrew Morton told Diana’s story – one side of the story – in a book that brought about the end of the ‘fairytale’ marriage. Diana – Her True Story, which was reissued after Diana’s death and renamed In Her Own Words, gave a picture of Charles and Diana’s life together and the part his mistress had to play in it, which is not quite what those who knew both Charles and Diana best remember.

So far, no one has attempted to tell the complete story. While Diana was alive the Prince would never allow it because he didn’t want to hurt either her or their children. In all their years together and apart, and despite intense provocation, he never spoke ill of her in any way. Now that she is dead Charles is even more determined that he will not defend himself and that history alone shall be his judge. If that means waiting until he is long dead, so be it. He has no qualms about meeting his maker. The evidence to support what really happened – letters, diaries, tapes, medical records, which explain the true nature of the relationship – is under lock and key at the Royal Family Archive at Windsor. One day in the future, when they are released, the whole truth will be told.

In the meantime, a number of his family and friends feel he has suffered enough and believe there should be some attempt to correct at least some of the misconceptions.

Diana said some terrible things about Charles, which she later regretted quite bitterly. Not, however, before millions of people were led to believe that she was taken ‘like a lamb to the slaughter’ into a loveless union, in order to produce an heir for a man who had no intention of honouring his marriage vows. On the strength of Diana’s words, there are many who believe that he carried on an affair with his mistress throughout his marriage, even sleeping with her the night before his wedding and resuming their affair immediately after the honeymoon. They believe Charles was a cold and insensitive husband and a cold and insensitive father, who only now, after Diana’s death, is beginning to show a little affection for his children. Some people even blame Charles for Diana’s death. And, because Diana said so on prime time television, in an interview for ‘Panorama’ in 1995, many believe he is not fit to be king.

It is hard to imagine Prince Charles’s emotions as he walked behind Diana’s cortège that September morning, their sons by his side, bravely fighting back their tears. Never had there been such public outpourings of love and grief for someone so few had ever met. The world had loved her, admired her, worshipped her. He had rejected her, divorced her. Why?

Charles: Victim or Villain? tries to explain what really happened in that marriage; to give a more objective view than Diana’s, and reveal more clearly than ever before the part Camilla Parker Bowles played in it. Not for the sake of the Prince of Wales – who, like Diana, is not entirely blameless – but for the sake of the millions of people who have lived through this royal soap opera and have never had an alternative account of what happened on which to form a judgement for themselves. At the moment there is only Diana’s account, which is flawed and inevitably partial, as even her friends will admit in private.

It is an attempt to describe why Charles married Diana, what life was like for them both, and what went so badly wrong that she felt compelled to tell the world and take very public revenge on her husband. What possessed Charles to confess his infidelity on camera – as he did to Jonathan Dimbleby in a two-and-a-half-hour documentary about his life in June 1994 – and how did he feel when he faced the public after the embarrassment of the Camillagate tapes that exposed his late-night ramblings on the telephone to his mistress?

The two young princes, William and Harry, have lived through it all – the embarrassment, the affairs, the divorce and, finally, the traumatic death of their mother. How are they faring as a family today? What do they think of Mrs Parker Bowles? What is the future likely to hold for them all?

This is a portrait of the Prince of Wales at fifty. A very private man, with a public role, in an intrusive media world. A single parent and future king, a man emotionally handcuffed by his upbringing and damaged by the failure of his marriage. He is a man who inspires great love and loyalty, but a man of contradictions. He can be the greatest company or the most sombre; the kindest, most considerate of human beings or the most selfish. He has warmth and charisma, and a wicked sense of fun but, when he doesn’t get what he wants, a fearsome temper that in fifty years he has never learnt to control. He is a man who cares about the disadvantaged, and the sick and dying, no less than the planet we pass on to future generations and the English we teach our children. A man who is cocooned from the real world, who has butlers and valets, helicopters and fast cars, yet who has seen more deprivation and who understands despair better than most politicians. A man whose life has been given over to duty to the institution he was born into, and who longs to modernise it, but who is thwarted by the very people his wife called ‘the enemy’ – the courtiers who rule royal life – and who must wait for the death of the mother he loves before he can begin his task. He is a man who cares above all else – even above his own happiness – for the future wellbeing of his sons. While they are children he can protect them, but he knows that as they come of age he will be powerless to stop the intrusion, the criticism and pressure that very nearly destroyed him.

ONE

Death of a Princess

‘They tell me there’s been an accident. What’s going on?’ Charles in the early hours of 31 August 1997

The first call alerting the Royal Family to Diana’s accident came through to Sir Robin Janvrin, the Queen’s deputy private secretary, at one o’clock on the morning of Sunday 31 August. He was asleep in his house on the Balmoral estate in Aberdeenshire. It was from the British ambassador in Paris, who had only sketchy news. There had been a car crash. Dodi Fayed, it seemed, had been killed, although there was no confirmation yet. The Princess of Wales, who had been travelling with him, was injured but no one knew how badly. Their car had smashed into the support pillars of a tunnel under the Seine. It had been travelling at high speed while trying to escape a group of paparazzi in hot pursuit on motorbikes.

Janvrin immediately telephoned the Queen and the Prince of Wales in their rooms at the castle. He then telephoned the Prince’s assistant private secretary, Nick Archer, who was staying in another house on the estate; also the Queen’s equerry and protection officers. They all agreed to meet in the offices at the castle, where they set up an operations room and manned the phones throughout the night.

Meanwhile, in London, the Prince’s team were being woken and told the news, ironically, by the tabloid press. The first call to Mark Bolland, the Prince’s deputy private secretary, came at 1 a.m. from the News of the World. Having gone to bed at his flat in the City after a very good dinner party, he let the answering machine take the call, and when he heard something about an accident in Paris dismissed it as the usual Saturday night fantasy. It was not until he heard the voice of Stuart Higgins, then editor of the Sun, a paper not published on a Sunday, speaking into the machine ten minutes later, that he realised something very odd was going on and picked up the phone. Higgins had much the same news as the Embassy. The reports were conflicting but it sounded as though Dodi had been killed and Diana injured.

The Prince’s press secretary, Sandy Henney, had also just gone to bed at her home in Surrey, having seen the last guest out after a fortieth birthday party for her sister-in-law. She too was woken by a journalist with a very similar story. The media, getting news directly from the emergency services, were in many ways better informed than the Embassy that night and provided a real service to the Prince’s staff.

Mark Bolland immediately rang Stephen Lamport, the Prince’s private secretary, at his home in west London, then Sandy Henney, and within minutes the phone lines across the capital and between London and Scotland were buzzing.

The Prince telephoned Bolland in London. ‘Robin tells me there’s been an accident. What’s going on?’

He wanted details. Shocked and unable to believe what he was hearing, he asked the same questions over and over again: What had caused the accident? What had Diana been doing in that situation? Who was driving? Where had it happened? Why had it happened? Questions to which, for the time being, there were no answers. They spoke for almost an hour.

There was no more concrete news. Reports one minute said Diana was seriously hurt, and the next suggested she had walked away with superficial injuries.

The Queen was also awake in her suite of rooms next door to her son’s on the first floor of the castle. Her private secretary, Sir Robert Fellowes, was on holiday in Norfolk, but like the Prince’s staff her own people were in constant touch with one another. The Prince’s private secretary on duty in Scotland was Nick Archer, but it was Stephen Lamport and Mark Bolland in London who were calling the shots.

Bolland telephoned Robin Janvrin to tell him that the Prince would be flying to Paris later that day to visit Diana in hospital, and needed a plane. ‘He’s going,’ he said. ‘This is not a matter for discussion. He is going to see his ex-wife.’

His request did not go down well initially. Was it the right thing to do? wondered Janvrin. An aeroplane of the Queen’s Flight couldn’t be ordered without the Queen’s specific agreement, and that was unlikely to be forthcoming.

‘Okay, fine,’ said Bolland. ‘We’ll take a scheduled flight from Aberdeen.’ The Queen would be irritated, no doubt, that yet again Diana was disrupting everyone’s lives. She had lost patience with Diana long ago, and as the week wore on she was confirmed in her belief that everything to do with her former daughter-in-law was always extraordinarily complicated.

Unbelievably, although the Queen and Prince Charles were just feet away from one another in their separate rooms, divided by paper-thin walls, it was their staff who were discussing the rights and wrongs of asking the Queen’s permission for Charles to use her aeroplane. Never was the true nature of this mother–son relationship more starkly demonstrated. Closely knit though the family appears, there is very little real communication between them. The Prince loves his parents dearly but they don’t talk. The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh had not known quite how serious the problems with their son’s marriage had been until 1987, when two friends wrote to the Queen, having decided independently and simultaneously that she ought to know what was going on. Their letters landed on her desk on the same day. They had witnessed some odd incidents, like Diana falling down the stairs at Sandringham, and Diana had told them on one occasion that her life with the Prince was impossible because of Mrs Parker Bowles, but they had not discussed the problems with their son.

That Sunday, Charles, William and Harry had all been planning to fly to London. The boys’ summer holiday was almost over and they were due to meet up with their mother, who was flying back from Paris. Diana always had the children for the last few days before they went back to school at the start of a new term, so that she could get everything ready and make sure they had the right kit. The Prince would spend a few days at Highgrove, his home in Gloucestershire, before heading for Provence, in the South of France, his habitual haunt in early September.

The Prince was in no doubt that he wanted to go and see Diana in Paris that morning, but uncertain whether he should take the children. He was worried that her injuries would be too upsetting for them. Clearly no decision could be made until they knew how bad her injuries were. And as the hours crept painfully past, he talked about the Princess, whom he still loved and prayed for every night, despite the failure of their marriage, despite the hurt that had existed between them.

‘I always thought it would end like this,’ he said, ‘with me having to nurse Diana through some terrible injury or illness. I always thought she’d come back to me and I would spend the rest of my time looking after her.’

The walls in Balmoral are so thin that there is no keeping of secrets. One regular visitor says that if you want to have a private conversation you have to put the plug in the wash basin and talk quietly, or it will be all round the castle. Inevitably, with this kind of drama going on, most of the family were by now awake and watching the television or listening to the radio, which was already given over to news of the accident. The Duke of York was staying in the castle at the time, also Princess Anne’s son Peter Phillips, then aged nineteen, two friends of the Queen and Princess Margaret, the Queen’s sister. William and Harry were asleep and it became a priority to get their radios out of their bedrooms and the television out of the nursery, to prevent them waking up and switching one of them on.

At about 3.30 a.m., Mark Bolland rang Robin Janvrin again to find out how he was doing with the plane, and whether he had woken up the people at RAF Northolt, in Greater London, where it was based. In the middle of the conversation, at 3.45, they were interrupted by a telephone call that came through from the Embassy in Paris for Janvrin, and he put Bolland on to Nick Archer while he took the call.

‘We can’t muck about with his plane,’ Bolland was saying. ‘Make sure Robin is quite clear what is going to happen …’

‘Oh, Mark, I think we’re going to have a change of plan.’

In the background Archer could hear Robin Janvrin breaking the news to the Prince of Wales on the telephone. ‘Sir, I’m very sorry to have to tell you, I’ve just had the Ambassador on the phone. The Princess died a short time ago.’

The announcement that went out at 4.30 a.m. said she had died at four o’clock. It had actually been earlier.

The Prince immediately rang Mark. ‘Robin has just told me she’s dead, Mark, is this true? What happened? What on earth was she doing there? How could this have happened? They’re all going to blame me, aren’t they? What do I do? What does this mean?’

Mark’s first reaction was to ring Camilla Parker Bowles to tell her that Diana had died, and warn her that she could expect a call at any moment from the Prince, in a state of serious distress. He had rung a number of close friends that night, and Camilla and the Prince had already spoken several times. She was shocked to the core by the news that Diana was dead, and utterly devastated for the boys; also terrified for the Prince, of what would happen to him, what people’s reaction would be.

Diana’s death came as a terrible shock to everyone. All the news had indicated that she had survived the crash, and with some reports having suggested she had walked away from the car, people were totally unprepared. The truth was that she had sustained terrible chest and head injuries. She had lost consciousness very soon after the impact, and never regained it. She had been treated in the wreckage of the Mercedes at the scene for about an hour and was then taken to the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital four miles away, where surgeons had fought for a further two hours to save her life, but in vain. The reaction was total horror and disbelief.

The Prince’s first thought was for the children. Should he wake them and tell them or let them sleep and tell them in the morning? He was absolutely dreading it, and didn’t know what to do for the best. The Queen felt strongly that they should be left to sleep and he took her advice and didn’t wake them up until 7.15. William had had a difficult night’s sleep and had woken many times. He had known, he said, that something awful was going to happen.

The Prince, like Camilla, realised only too well what the public reaction might be, and what the media would say. ‘They’re all going to blame me,’ he said. ‘The world’s going to go completely mad, isn’t it? We’re going to see a reaction that we’ve never seen before. And it could destroy everything. It could destroy the monarchy.’

‘Yes, sir, I think it could,’ said Lamport with brutal honesty. ‘It’s going to be very difficult for your mother, sir. She’s going to have to do things she may not want to do, or feel comfortable doing, but if she doesn’t do them, then that’s the end of it.’

The Queen’s first difficulty was upon her before dawn had broken. The Prince decided he should be the one to go to Paris to collect Diana’s body, but the Queen was against the idea and was strongly supported by her private secretary. The Princess was no longer a member of the Royal Family, argued Sir Robert Fellowes; it would be wrong to make too much fuss.

Robin Janvrin came up with the remark that clinched it. ‘What would you rather, Ma’am,’ he said; ‘that she came back in a Harrods’ van?’ There was no further argument.

Diana’s love affair with Dodi Fayed had been a source of deep concern to everyone at court, not least the Prince of Wales. Not because he resented her happiness – it was his deepest wish that Diana would find happiness – but because he feared it would end in disaster. He feared that Diana was in danger of being used by the al Fayed publicity machine. Dodi’s father, Mohamed al Fayed, the high-profile Egyptian owner of Harrods, was a controversial figure. Long denied British citizenship, he had tried relentlessly to ingratiate himself with the establishment. He had done some inspired matchmaking that summer between his playboy son and the Princess of Wales in the South of France, and had milked it for all it was worth. He had scarcely been out of the news for a month: he had been photographed with William and Harry, the Queen’s grandsons, who had been his guests on board his yacht, and was hoping for the greatest coup of all, to secure the mother of a future king of England as a daughter-in-law.

Dodi was a serious member of the international jet set, a kind and gentle man, but with more money than intellect, and a string of conquests to his name amongst the world’s most beautiful women. While he was busy wooing Diana, another woman thought she was engaged to marry him. He dabbled in the film business, but was essentially financed by his rich father, who denied him nothing. Dodi and Diana did appear to be in love, and may well have gone on to marry had things turned out differently. She would have been the biggest catch in the world for him. He would have provided the wealth she needed, even after her divorce settlement, to finance her enormously expensive lifestyle, and it would have been the ultimate two-fingered gesture to the Royal Family she so despised.

The boys had not enjoyed their holiday on board al Fayed’s yacht. They had not taken to Dodi or his father and had hated the publicity – as a result William had had a terrible row with his mother – and the whole trip had been extremely uncomfortable. And to add insult to injury, at the end of their stay, their two royal protection officers were taken aside by a Fayed aide, and handed a brown envelope each, stuffed with notes. ‘Mr al Fayed would like to thank you for all you have done,’ he said. In a panic, they immediately telephoned Colin Trimming, the Prince’s detective and head of the royal protection squad, and told him what had happened. ‘You’ve got to give it back,’ he said.

‘We’ve tried,’ they said, ‘but we were told that Mr al Fayed would be very upset if we didn’t accept it.’ The money went back.

The mention of Harrods to the Queen was enough to trigger Operation Overlord – the plan, which had been in existence for many years but never previously needed, to return the body of a member of the Royal Family to London. There is a BAe146 plane ear-marked for the purpose, which can be airborne at short notice from RAF Northolt. It had always been thought the Queen Mother might be its first passenger, which given she was then ninety-seven years old was not unreasonable. No one in their wildest dreams could have guessed it would be used for Diana, still so young and beautiful, super-fit and brimming with health and vitality.

The plane left Northolt at 10 a.m. that Sunday morning, bound for Aberdeen, with Stephen Lamport, Mark Bolland and Sandy Henney on board. First stop was RAF Wittering in Rutland, where it collected Diana’s sisters, Lady Sarah McCorquodale, who lived nearby, and Lady Jane Fellowes. It was Robert Fellowes who had broken the news to Diana’s family, and the Prince had telephoned Sarah to suggest they might like to go with him to collect the body, whereupon Jane had driven up from Norfolk to join her sister. From Wittering they flew to Aberdeen, where they collected the Prince of Wales, and then on to Paris. The Prince had decided this was not a trip for the children and so they stayed at Balmoral with Tiggy Legge-Bourke, who, as the Queen said, ‘by the grace of God’ had just arrived in Scotland ready to take the Princes down to London to meet their mother. She and their cousin Peter Phillips were utterly brilliant with William and Harry that day and for the remainder of the week.

Diana’s sisters spent most of the flight to Paris in tears. The Prince was controlled but clearly very shaken. Stephen Lamport took everyone through what would happen at the other end. There was a possibility, he warned Sarah and Jane, that Mohamed al Fayed might be at the hospital and if he was the Prince would have to speak to him; how did they feel about that? Both sisters were adamant they wanted nothing to do with Mr al Fayed; they didn’t even want to see him.

In the event he wasn’t there. By the time the Prince’s party arrived al Fayed had already taken his son’s body home for prayers in Regent’s Park Mosque, followed by a Muslim burial that night at a cemetery in Woking, Surrey. On arrival at the hospital the Prince was met by President Chirac, who had come in person to express his nation’s great sadness at the death of the Princess.

With protocol observed, the Prince and the two sisters were taken to see Diana’s body. A doctor accompanied them into the small room on the first floor of the hospital, as well as a priest, whom they had specifically asked for. It was a distressing sight for which none of them was adequately prepared. Diana’s body was laid out in a coffin which had been flown to Paris earlier that morning on a Hercules from RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire. Levertons, the north London family firm of undertakers, were an integral part of Operation Overlord. The Princess had been embalmed and was wearing a dress that her butler, Paul Burrell, had flown out with earlier, but the body that lay so still and cold and empty looked nothing like the Diana they had known. Her head had been badly damaged in the crash and her face was distorted. The Prince told Diana’s sisters how glad he was that he had not taken William and Harry to Paris with him. It would have been much too distressing for them.

They stayed with Diana’s body for seven minutes. Sarah and Jane were sobbing helplessly when they left and were taken to a room for some privacy while they recovered. The Prince was not crying when he came back into the corridor, but it was obvious that he had been, and was visibly very distressed. His eyes were quite red, his face racked with pain. A small crowd was waiting in the corridor, most of them hospital staff, and also a number of men in dark suits. The Prince came out of the door, stopped, closed his eyes and bit his lip. Then after a moment’s pause, while he fought to regain his composure, he set off down the corridor, a private man no longer, to shake hands with the doctors and nurses and thank them for all they had done. As someone watching remarked, ‘He went from human being to Windsor’ – as nearly fifty years of training ensured he would. Duty above all else. When he heard that the parents of the Welsh bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, employed by the al Fayeds, who had been the sole survivor in the accident, were at the hospital, he immediately said he must talk to them.

Moments later the coffin, by now closed and draped with the maroon and yellow of the Royal Standard, was carried out of the room. It was suddenly obvious that the men in dark suits were the undertakers, and without a word needing to be said, everyone in the corridor spontaneously formed two lines and silently bowed their heads as the coffin passed between them and down the stairs into a waiting Renault Espace.

There were thousands of people in the streets outside. The whole of Paris seemed to know who was in the Espace and what was going on. To a man, woman and child they were silent. As the motorcade made its way slowly through the city and out on to the périphérique towards the airport, the people on the pavements bowed their heads in silence, people in street cafés stood up as the cars passed, each one flanked by two large motorbikes on either side, and no one made a sound. The Prince was deeply moved, and in the silence that enveloped the aircraft on the flight home, with everyone wrapped up in their own thoughts and emotions, he said, ‘Wasn’t it wonderful that everybody stood up.’

But if the tribute paid to Diana by the Parisians had been moving, the arrangements that had been made unbeknownst to him for the next stage of her journey enraged him. While Sarah and Jane disappeared into another part of the cabin to have a cigarette, the Prince asked what arrangements had been made after they touched down at Northolt. The Prime Minister, Tony Blair, would be there, he knew, also the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Airlie, who is the most senior member of the Queen’s household. He wanted to know how many RAF people would be there to carry the coffin, whether the flowers he had said he wanted had been sorted out, whether there would be a proper hearse to carry the coffin, and where they were planning to take Diana’s body. The answer to that final question was the mortuary in Fulham, commonly used by the Royal Coroner.

‘Who decided that? Nobody asked me. Diana is going to the Chapel Royal at St James’s Palace. Sort it. I don’t care who has made this decision. She is going to the Chapel Royal.’

Sandy Henney spent much of the remainder of the flight on the plane’s telephone ensuring that the Prince’s instructions were carried out to the last detail.

The decision had almost certainly been made by Robert Fellowes, doing what he imagined the Queen would have wanted, without actually asking her, but his second guessing was not far off the mark. There is no doubt that in the course of the days leading up to Diana’s funeral, the hostility that both the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh had felt towards their erstwhile daughter-in-law came dangerously close to the surface on several occasions. She had caused nothing but trouble and embarrassment over the years, and here she was, in death, still managing to cause mayhem.

The Prince’s relationship with Diana had been turbulent and troubled and they were no longer man and wife, but Diana was still the mother of his children and, in a way, he still loved her. He wanted her treated with the dignity she deserved. After Sandy’s hasty and heated phone calls from the plane, the plan about the mortuary was changed and it was agreed that the Princess of Wales would be taken to the Chapel Royal at St James’s Palace, just yards from the office they shared so disastrously until their divorce. She was also to have outriders. And while he was at it, her sisters Sarah and Jane were to be given a plane to take them wherever they wanted to go, and if they wanted to go with the body into London first, then so be it. So at the Prince’s bidding, the plane which had brought the Prime Minister from his constituency to Northolt to meet the returning party was kept on hold, but in the end was not required. The sisters accompanied the body into London and chose to make their own ways home.

The plane carrying the coffin touched down at Northolt and taxied out of sight of the reception party, where it came to a halt. One of the crew climbed out and opened up the cargo hatch, and the group onboard listened in silence to the bolts holding the coffin in place being loosened beneath them. The plane then taxied on and came to a halt in front of the airport building where Tony Blair, David Airlie and 150 or so photographers and pressmen were waiting quietly on the tarmac. In silence the coffin was unloaded and carried to the waiting hearse. The only sound to be heard was the Royal Standard flapping in the breeze.

Wrapped in thought, his emotions in turmoil, the Prince of Wales climbed back aboard the aircraft, accompanied by Stephen Lamport, to fly back to Balmoral and be with his grieving sons, while the hearse made its way slowly down the A40 into west London.

It was only then that the real enormity of what had happened began to dawn on the Palace staff. The motorway, the bridges and embankments – and when they ran out, the roads and pavements – were full of cars and people who had come to watch and weep as Diana’s coffin passed by. Tributes had started pouring in from all over the world, and flowers were being laid at the gate of every building with which Diana was associated.

This, they realised, was going to be unlike anything anyone had ever seen before.

TWO

A Nation Mourns

‘A girl given the name of the ancient goddess of hunting was, in the end, the most hunted person of the modern age.’

Charles Spencer

In the days following Diana’s death, the future of the monarchy hung perilously in the balance. As the mountain of flowers outside her Kensington Palace home grew ever higher, spreading further and further into the park, the people of Britain, stunned, shocked and numb with grief, looked for someone to blame for their awesome sense of loss.

The national reaction to Diana’s death bordered on hysteria. Few of the people who mourned had ever met the Princess, yet her compassion and vulnerability had touched a chord deep in the public psyche. Everyone grieved for the stranger whom they felt they knew, with a depth of feeling never before shown for a public figure. Months later, counsellors were still treating people who had been unable to come to terms with their grief. In a rather studied tribute, the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, called her ‘the people’s Princess’, and it was the perfect epithet: the people felt she cared and spoke for them, and in a curious way she probably took greater comfort from her relationship with strangers than with almost anyone else.

‘I feel like everyone else in this country,’ said Tony Blair. ‘I am utterly devastated. We are a nation in a state of shock, in mourning, in grief. It is so deeply painful for us. She was a wonderful and a warm human being. Though her own life was often sadly touched by tragedy, she touched the lives of so many others in Britain and through the world, with joy and with comfort. She was the people’s Princess and that is how she will remain in our hearts and memories for ever.’

Whatever the psychological and sociological explanations for the nation’s reaction to her death might be, there was not only grief, but also anger on the streets of London – anger directed in very large part at the Royal Family. As Charles had instinctively feared would happen, some went so far as to suggest that he was responsible for her death. Had he loved her instead of his mistress, they said, this would never have happened. They would still have been married and she would never have been in a car racing through the streets of Paris with Dodi Fayed. Yet at the same time others were leaving tributes to both of them outside Kensington and all the other palaces, ‘To Diana and Dodi, together for ever’, and paying eulogies to the man who had brought Diana true love and happiness.

There was also anger at the tabloid press, which encouraged the paparazzi by paying such huge sums of money for photographs and stories. In the weeks before her death, the red-top papers, and some of the broadsheets too, had been full of long-lens photographs of Diana and Dodi canoodling on his father’s yacht in the South of France. Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer, had not held back when he heard the news at his home in South Africa. ‘I always believed the press would kill her in the end,’ he said. ‘But not even I could imagine that they would take such a direct hand in her death as seems to be the case.’ At that time it was thought the paparazzi were entirely responsible for the accident; and he said that the editors and proprietors of every newspaper which had paid money for intrusive pictures of his sister had ‘blood on their hands’. The public, of course, had not been slow to buy these newspapers, all of which argued a vicious circle of supply and demand. But this was not the time to draw too much attention to hypocrisy.

Strangely, no blame was ever levelled at Dodi, or even his father, who had provided the car they were travelling in, and who also employed the driver, Henri Paul. He had not been the regular driver and, it soon transpired, he had been several times over the drink-driving limit that night. The proper driver had been sent off in a decoy car. It was an elaborate attempt to try to foil the paparazzi, who were all waiting outside the Ritz Hotel, where they had had dinner that night, ready to follow them home. Yet Dodi failed to make the driver slow down, and he was doing well over 100 mph when he ploughed into the underpass. Almost overnight, the paparazzi ceased to be seen as the sole cause of the accident. Afraid that the tables might turn and that, as Henri Paul’s employer, he might find himself liable, Mohamed al Fayed shared his own private theory about the crash with the press. It was, he suggested, a conspiracy cooked up by the Queen and the security services to assassinate Diana so that she would not marry Dodi; such a marriage would have given William, second in line to the throne of England, a Muslim and Egyptian step-father. It was a ludicrous notion invented by a man who had spent the months since his son’s death telling lies about Diana’s last words, which medical evidence suggested could never have been uttered. Yet in the spring of 1998 he was given airtime on ITV to explain why he believed the Queen had murdered Diana and Dodi. His words were picked up not only in Britain but in Egypt, and as a result the Queen’s life is now at risk. Her security arrangements have necessarily been stepped up considerably, so much so that a friend whom she was visiting recently said over dinner, ‘Ma’am, I thought things were supposed to be better with the IRA these days.’

‘No,’ the Queen replied. ‘They think there’s a good chance I’m going to be killed by a Muslim.’

The Queen would no doubt have been horrified by a marriage between Diana and Dodi, and William and Harry no less appalled. And they would not have been alone. Millions of people were shocked by the overtly sexual nature of the relationship, which Diana seemed to be flaunting so brazenly to the press. No one was labouring under the illusion that she was still the shy, blushing innocent Princess. Her various well-documented affairs had put an end to that. Apart from the much publicised revelations about James Hewitt, she had been publicly blamed by the wife of rugby player Will Carling for destroying their marriage. In his autobiograpy, published in October 1998, Carling was coy about the relationship, saying, ‘I was attracted to her but I never made a pass at her. To be honest, if I had had a sexual relationship with her I wouldn’t say I had. I don’t think that would be right.’ At the time, however, he boasted quite openly to his friends about the sexual nature of his relationship with Diana.

The press was becoming increasingly critical of Diana’s conduct. She had subjected her boys to Dodi and, worse still, to his father, and she was paying the price.

‘The sight of a paunchy playboy groping a scantily-dressed Diana must appal and humiliate Prince William …’ wrote Lynda Lee-Potter in the Daily Mail on 27 August. ‘As the mother of two young sons she ought to have more decorum and sense.’

‘Princess Diana’s press relations are now clearly established,’ wrote Bernard Ingham for the 31 August edition of the Express. ‘Any publicity is good publicity … I’m told she and Dodi are made for each other, both having more brass than brains.’

On the same day, Chris Hutchins wrote in the Sunday Mirror, ‘Just when Diana began to believe that her current romance with likeable playboy Dodi Fayed had wiped out her past liaisons, a new tape recording is doing the rounds of Belgravia dinner parties. And this one is hot, hot, hot! I must remember to take it up with Diana next time we find ourselves on adjacent running machines at our west London gym.’

But then, suddenly, the music stopped and, as in the party game, all those who were still moving were caught out. Overnight, Diana found instant beatification; pity those columnists who had committed their thoughts to print on the Saturday afternoon, little knowing that their target would be a saint by the time their words hit the streets on Sunday.

‘She was the butterfly who shone with the light of glamour which illuminated all our lives,’ wrote Ross Benson in the Express; ‘A beacon of light has been extinguished,’ said Lady Thatcher, the former Prime Minister; ‘A comet streaked across the sky of public life and entranced the world,’ wrote Simon Jenkins in The Times; and Paul Johnson in the Daily Mail called her ‘A gem of purest ray serene.’

Her love affair with Dodi was given new status: she had found ‘true love at last’, and the couple may very well have been on the brink of announcing their engagement. It was a week of instant judgements and media saturation, and while one pundit after another filled the airwaves or the column inches on the loss to the nation, the nation itself displayed its distress on the streets of every town and city. People of all ages and from all walks of life wept openly and clasped one another for comfort. They queued, in some places for hours, to sign books of condolence, and in many instances people sat down and wrote in the books for half an hour. In London, they pilgrimaged from one royal palace to another to lay flowers with messages to Diana and Dodi.

Meanwhile the Royal Family sat, stoic and silent, in Scotland, and the nation’s anger grew. It was assumed they didn’t care about the nation’s grief. If they had cared – the received wisdom went – they would have come to London to be with the people. There had been no statement about Diana’s death, so it was assumed they didn’t care about that either. Instead, it was business as usual. That the family had even gone to church on the morning of Diana’s death – just hours after hearing the news – and taken the boys with them, and that there was not so much as a quivering lower lip to be seen, provoked more outrage. What further proof could there be that everything the Princess had said about this cold, heartless family she had married into was absolutely true?

Yet in the privacy of their own home there had been plenty of tears. The Prince of Wales is an emotional man, and does cry, but he was brought up to keep emotion of all sorts to himself: a characteristic which, in a less touchy-feely, emotionally transparent society, was never questioned. Indeed, to keep one’s grief to oneself was a sign of strength. Yet in 1997 it was taken as a sign of insensitivity. It is not a cold heartless family, as close friends know, but it is rare for anyone outside that charmed inner circle to see a display of either emotion or affection.

In a more religious age, taking a grief-stricken family to church would have been seen as the natural thing to do. In the material nineties it was seen as insensitive and unfeeling. In fact, they had gone to church that Sunday before Charles set out for Paris because Prince William had specifically said that he would like to ‘talk to Mummy’. It was a week in which the children were given choices about everything, when their needs came before public relations. Church has always been a central part of the family routine and in the emotional turmoil of that Sunday, the familiarity, routine and permanence of a church service was comforting to them all.

God is very much a part of the Prince’s life and his thinking and philosophy. He doesn’t wear it on his sleeve, but he is a sincere believer that having a spiritual dimension to life, having faith of some sort or another – whether it is in God, Mohammed, Buddha or anyone else – is important to the human soul. He also believes that religious and cultural diversity is a real strength, and fears for Scotland and Wales breaking away from the rest of the UK for much the same reason.

His own choice of religion is Prayer Book Church of England, and he is a regular churchgoer no matter where he is. When he is at Highgrove on a Sunday, he will attend one of five village churches run by Chris Mulholland, vicar of the neighbouring village of Leighterton, who holds services in rotation. He has boycotted Tetbury Church ever since the vicar, John Hawthorne, denounced the Prince in the pages of most national newspapers for his adultery with Mrs Parker Bowles. It did not endear him to the Prince, particularly as Charles had given his support to a number of Tetbury Church fundraising initiatives.

Among the Prince’s great loves are old churches – an enthusiasm he discovered he shared with Matthew Butler, his assistant private secretary, who introduced him to one or two he had never seen before. Fitting an old church or two into the schedule at the end of a day was a great treat for the Prince and when, at the end of his secondment, Matthew returned to his career in business and was awarded an MVO, he chose to receive it in Cardiff Castle, which was unusual for someone used to working in London and who lived in Tetbury. ‘Matthew, what are you doing here?’ asked the Prince as he ceremoniously handed over the medal. He explained that having organised the Prince’s twenty-fifth anniversary tour of Wales it seemed more appropriate than Buckingham Palace. ‘Oh, I suppose so,’ said the Prince, then, suddenly lighting up, ‘Matthew, I saw this wonderful church the other day …’

Of the churches they visited together, there was one in Staunton Harold in Leicestershire which the Prince found particularly poignant. It had been built by Sir Robert Shirley, Baronet, a Royalist, and ancestor of the present Earl Ferrers, during the Protectorate in 1653, after the turbulent reign of Charles I. He died of natural causes while imprisoned in the Tower of London in 1656. There was an inscription over the west door, which the Prince seemed to take to heart:

‘All things sacred were throughout the nation either demolished or profaned.’

With his religious conviction running deep, the Prince firmly believes in life after death. He talks about death being ‘the next great journey in our existence’, and is dismayed that as westerners we have become separated from the cycles of Nature, and what they have to teach us. Speaking at a Macmillan Fund anniversary a few years ago, he said, ‘The seasons of the year provided for our ancestors a lesson which could not be ignored; that life is surely followed by death, but also that death can be seen as a doorway to renewed life. In Christianity the message is seen in the mystery of resurrection, and in the picture of Christ as a seed dying in the ground in order to produce the new life that supplies bread, and sustenance.’

The subject of death has fascinated the Prince for a long time. He has suffered great personal loss on a number of occasions – most notably the death of his cousin Prince William of Gloucester in an air crash in 1972, and the brutal murder of Lord Mountbatten, Nicholas Knatchbull and others by the IRA in 1979. Despite the difference in age, his great-uncle Mountbatten was closer to him than anybody else, and the news that he had been suddenly and mercilessly blown to bits by a terrorist bomb while out fishing with his family in Ireland had been completely devastating. Charles was also with his friend Major Hugh Lindsay when he was killed in a horrifying skiing accident in Switzerland in 1988. He has watched friends die, and the children of friends, and visited hospices and hospitals and talked to strangers about their experiences of death, as Diana herself did so sympathetically.

For Charles, death is a mystery and a painful parting, but not something to fear, and Diana had much the same view. She too believed in life after death and frequently consulted mediums and clairvoyants. She was quite certain that her paternal grandmother, Cynthia, Lady Spencer, who had died in 1972 when Diana was a child, kept guard over her in the spirit world.

Balmoral is the Royal Family’s spiritual home, the place where they instinctively feel relaxed and at ease, where they adopt an informality that is not seen in any of the Queen’s other residences. They had stayed there because it was the most sensible place for the boys to be, and that week William and Harry were the top priority. They love Balmoral like the rest of the Royal Family. They love the freedom, the walking, the fishing, the stalking, riding, go-karting; and in that week when their entire world had been turned upside down, they needed the comfort and familiarity of home. Buckingham Palace is little more than the Royal Family’s institutional headquarters, and to have brought the boys to London would have been to imprison them within four walls. At Balmoral they could be certain of some privacy in which to begin to take in the enormity of what had happened, and to prepare for their mother’s funeral and the most traumatic ordeal of their young lives.

Yet in London, the anger was mounting. People wanted a public display of grief. ‘They’re up in bloody Scotland,’ was the common cry. ‘They should be here. Those children should be down here.’

The whole Royal Family was well aware of the negative atmosphere building up in the south. They could see for themselves what was going on in the media and there was also a constant stream of news, views and advice coming in from politicians, friends, historians and VIPs from all over the world. But the Prince recognised it was not for him to take the lead. There was nothing he could usefully say which could have helped anyone. He had brought Diana’s body home from Paris; but if he also made a statement about how very saddened he was by her death, the public would have called him a hypocrite.

The Daily Mail headline on Tuesday morning – ‘Charles weeps bitter tears of guilt’ – only exacerbated the problem. It was an obscene headline over a picture of Charles taken some months before which the newspaper swiftly recognised had been a mis-judgement. The Royal Family was appalled, and from that morning onwards stopped putting the newspapers out on display for everyone to read at Balmoral, as they previously had. It seemed that the Prince’s only option was to keep a low profile and look after his sons, but by the middle of the week, when his mother’s advisers still saw no need to put on a public display of emotion, he became more forceful.

Meanwhile arrangements were underway for the funeral, and once again, there was fierce disagreement between the Prince’s office at St James’s Palace and the Queen’s at Buckingham Palace. Robert Fellowes was in an unenviable position. He was torn between duty to his wife, whom he adored, and his employer. Jane was very deeply distressed by the death of her sister and, like the rest of the Spencer family, had very definite ideas about how Diana’s funeral should be handled. While wanting to respect her wishes, Fellowes also had to think of what was the best course of action for the monarchy. The Spencer family wanted a very small, private funeral, and the Queen, inclined to agree to a minimum of fuss, strongly supported this wish to keep it small and for family only. The Prince, however, felt very strongly that Diana should have nothing less than a full royal funeral at Westminster Abbey, and had told Sarah and Jane on the plane coming back from Paris that he thought it would be impossible to do anything else. Although reluctant at first, once they saw the public reaction they began to realise that this was no family affair; they couldn’t keep it to themselves. There were bitter exchanges between the two camps. Even once a state funeral had been agreed upon, Earl Spencer and Sir Robert Fellowes thought that it should only be Spencers who walked behind the cortège. The Prince disagreed, and the question was not to be resolved until the last minute.

There were yet more rows over who should sit on the Funeral Committee, set up on the day of Diana’s death, chaired by Lord Airlie, the Lord Chamberlain, which met throughout the week in the Chinese Room at Buckingham Palace. The Prince of Wales wanted Downing Street represented on the committee, as did Tony Blair. The Queen didn’t, and it was left to Robin Janvrin to persuade Robert Fellowes that they needed help from Number 10.

As the week progressed, the absence of a flag flying at half mast at Buckingham Palace became another issue, upon which much of the public’s anger and emotion was focused. Outside the Palace, the piles of flowers grew ever more mountainous; flags were flying at half mast all over the country, and yet none of the Queen’s men could reach a decision about Palace protocol. The Royal Standard never flies at half mast over Buckingham Palace because the sovereign is never dead. The minute one dies, he or she is immediately succeeded by another: ‘The King is dead, long live the King.’

This was one occasion, however, where it was clear that the people of Britain didn’t give a damn about protocol. They wanted to see some feeling, some indication that the Royal Family was affected by the death of the Princess, and there appeared to be no such feeling. None of them had spoken publicly, none of them had been seen, and the most elementary of gestures, the lowering of a flag, had not been observed. To the press and to the nation this embodied everything that was irrelevant and out of touch about the monarchy in the nineties, and stood in stark contrast to the warmth and compassion of the Princess, which the public had so admired. It caused a furious row internally and, in the heat of the moment, it was suggested that Sir Robert Fellowes might ‘impale himself on his own flag staff’.

Finally Stephen Lamport spoke to Prince Charles. ‘You’ve got to talk to your mother. You’ve got to make her understand. You’re the only person who can do it.’

The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh were entirely taken aback by the reaction to Diana’s death, and were not pleased at being told how to behave in order to appease public opinion. The Queen was so often castigated for being a remote mother who always put the country before her children. Now, on the one occasion on which she was putting her grieving grandchildren first, she was being castigated for not being in London when her country needed her. After discussing the matter with David Airlie, the Queen was persuaded that a public sign of grief was required and agreed on the Thursday that a Union Flag would fly at half mast from Buckingham Palace.

That same day the family ventured out of the gates of Balmoral for the first time since the morning of Diana’s death, as a means of gently preparing William and Harry for the funeral that was to be held two days later. The Prince of Wales had asked Sandy Henney, his press secretary, to come and have a chat with them. She had been in London for most of the week and witnessed what was going on there. She had felt the mood, and was one of the many people who had been feeding information up to Scotland all week, saying, ‘You can’t read about this, you can’t even see it on television. There is real hatred building up here, and the public is incensed by your silence.’

She took the children aside. ‘Mummy’s death has had the most amazing impact on people,’ she said. ‘They really miss her, and when you go down to London you will see something you will never ever see again and it may come as a bit of a shock. We want you to know about it so you will be ready for it.’

Flowers had been piling up outside the gates of Balmoral, although in nothing like the quantity at Buckingham Palace, St James’s or Kensington Palace in London. So the following day, when the children expressed the desire to go to church again, the Prince of Wales took the opportunity to give them a taster of what was awaiting them in the capital, and let them walk amongst the bouquets, reading the messages.

About sixty members of the press were waiting outside the gates of Balmoral that day, yet they uttered not a single word as the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, Peter Phillips, the Prince of Wales, William and Harry climbed out of their cars to look at the flowers and tributes. The only sound to be heard, apart from the clicking of the camera shutters, were the voices of the royal party. Five days after their mother’s death, the country had its first view of the boys, and it was a touching scene. All three Princes, father and sons, were visibly moved by what they saw and taken aback by the messages attached to most bouquets.

‘Look at this one, Papa,’ said Harry, grabbing hold of his father’s hand and pulling him down. ‘Read this one.’

Captured on film, the gesture sent shock waves around the world. The Prince of Wales did seem to have a heart after all. He actually held his son’s hand, something no one could ever have imagined before. He also seemed to have aged.

Of all the criticism Diana threw at the Prince during their bitter war of words and television, that he was unfeeling and cold was the one that hurt him most. It was demonstrably untrue, as anyone who has seen Charles with his children knows very well. Diana knew it too, and later regretted her words.

The sight of the Prince of Wales and his sons did much to soften the public mood, and when the Queen made a surprising live television broadcast that Friday evening before the funeral, the mood softened further. The fact that it was only the second time during her reign that she had broadcast to the nation other than at Christmas – the first being during the Gulf War – made it an additionally impressive gesture.

‘Since last Sunday’s dreadful news we have seen, throughout Britain and around the world, an overwhelming expression of sadness at Diana’s death.

‘We have all been trying in our different ways to cope. It is not easy to express a sense of loss, since the initial shock is often succeeded by a mixture of other feelings: disbelief, incomprehension, anger – and concern for all who remain.

‘We have all felt those emotions in these last few days. So what I say to you now, as your Queen and as a grandmother, I say from my heart.

‘First, I want to pay tribute to Diana myself. She was an exceptional and gifted human being. In good times and bad, she never lost her capacity to smile and laugh, nor to inspire others with her warmth and kindness.

‘I admired and respected her – for her energy and commitment to others, and especially for her devotion to her two boys.

‘This week at Balmoral, we have all been trying to help William and Harry come to terms with the devastating loss that they and the rest of us have suffered.

‘No one who knew Diana will ever forget her. Millions of others who never met her, but felt they knew her, will remember her.

‘I for one believe that there are lessons to be drawn from her life and from the extraordinary and moving reaction to her death.’

The Queen’s words were delivered in the nick of time.

The decision about who should walk behind the cortège was not made until the very last moment. The Prince of Wales wanted to walk as a mark of respect to the Princess, who despite everything had been his wife for fifteen years, and he wanted his sons to walk too. He felt intuitively that this was something they should do for their mother and that it would aid the grieving process. Earl Spencer, backed by Sir Robert Fellowes, had been against it. He had wanted to walk behind his sister’s cortège on his own. There was a bitter exchange on the telephone between the Prince and the Earl in which Earl Spencer hung up on the Prince of Wales. Over dinner on the Friday night, when the whole Royal Family was together at Buckingham Palace, the Duke of Edinburgh put an end to the argument by saying that he would walk too. The next morning Earl Spencer was told what was going to happen, and the three men and two boys all walked together.