DIANA’S KNOWLEDGE OF Charles and his set was mostly culled from the Daily Mail The stories she read were often accompanied by photographs of the Prince with a “new friend”—usually someone blonde, busty and pretty. There had been a parade of beautiful young women before and after Sarah’s unfortunate royal romance. As each candidate came and went the media elected a new future Princess of Wales: Davina Sheffield, Sabrina Guinness, Lady Cecil Kerr, Lady Jane Wellesley and the fiery Anna Wallace all acquired brief fame as a possible royal bride.
Sarah did not discuss with Diana her past relationship with Charles. Neither did she say anything about the two married women—Kanga Tryon and Camilla Parker Bowles—who dominated his private life but were seldom photographed with him unless others were present. It is doubtful that Sarah fully understood the pressure and confusion that Charles suffered because of his bachelorhood, and Diana had no idea of it whatsoever: she saw him as a dashing figure. He had been dubbed “Action Man” by the press because of his sporting prowess, and because he could pilot a fighter aeroplane, skipper a mine-sweeper, perform as a paratrooper. He skied, sailed, surfed, hunted, fished and had even been known to race camels. He played polo and was an excellent horseman. He was always in demand and forever in the public eye. Diana sensed in him a sadness, which increased his appeal.
Charles’s bachelor status placed him in an intolerable predicament: there was deep concern inside and outside the Royal Family as to when and who he would marry. But unlike any other man, he could not marry a woman for love alone. At this time he was emotionally and sexually torn between his feelings for Kanga, who “understood” him, and for Camilla, who “excited him as no other woman had.” Either would have to divorce her husband to marry him. For any union he would need the approval of the Queen and Parliament, and it would not be forthcoming in either of these instances. The Church of England teaches that marriage is indissoluble, so it stood to reason that a Prince of Wales, who on succeeding to the throne would also become supreme Governor of the Church of England and Defender of the Faith, could not marry a divorcee.
Charles had been warned that such a decision on his part would spell disaster for his family and his country. “You must remember Uncle David [Edward VIII, Duke of Windsor],” was the message. Uncle David’s notorious affair and subsequent marriage to the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson had precipitated his abdication and brought his younger brother, George VI, to the throne. Perhaps if “Uncle David” could have kept Mrs. Simpson as his mistress and married another woman he might have held on to his throne. After all, Edward VII, Charles’s great-great grandfather, had always had his mistresses. His favourite, Alice Keppel, was Camilla’s great-grandmother, of which Camilla had reminded Charles at their first meeting in 1972, adding, it is said, “So how about it, then?”
He was serving in the Navy at the time and Camilla Shand was dating his polo friend Andrew Parker Bowles, and had previously dated Princess Anne. Camilla was not only direct, she was fun to be with, a good sport and sportswoman. She loved to hunt, and had none of the artifice of the young débutantes he generally met Prince Charles felt comfortable with her. They fell instantly in love and she dropped Parker Bowles, and entered into an affair with Charles. But Camilla, who was a commoner and “a woman of experience,” as one courtier euphemistically referred to her, was not considered acceptable by the Queen or the Prince’s advisers as a future Princess of Wales. He was given no option but to cast aside the idea of marrying Camilla and look elsewhere for a more suitable prospective wife.
Charles heeded the advice and saw a number of other young women. Camilla made no public statement, but retaliated by marrying Parker Bowles. When he became godfather to her son, Charles realized he had lost the woman he loved. It was not long before he and Camilla were once again lovers. His one hope was that she would remain his mistress and that whoever he took as his bride would be tolerant of his alliance.
However, finding the right young woman, whether or not he had a mistress, was difficult. By the Act of Settlement of 1701, she could not be Roman Catholic. She must be capable of bearing children, pass a stringent investigation into her past to make sure there were no dark scandals lurking there, and be approved by the Queen. She should preferably be English of impeccable ancestry. This last was not an absolute, but he was discouraged from dating eligible foreigners, for the Queen and the government were convinced that the British people would not react favourably to a non-British future queen.
“I don’t know why any sane girl would ever want to take me on,” Charles once said. Diana had been right to identify in him a deep, inner sadness. He had been hurt throughout his life, bullied in childhood by his father, who continued to snipe at and belittle him in public. “The two could hardly bear to be in each other’s company,” one observer noted.
Prince Philip’s resentment towards his son was due partly to the disparity between their personalities. Charles had developed into an able sportsman—he could ride, shoot, ski and surf with the best—but he was not inclined towards locker-room jokes and much preferred the company of women and older men, like his uncle Earl Mountbatten or Laurens van der Post, the South African-born writer, explorer and mystic, who, when Charles was in his early twenties, had begun to counsel him on spiritual matters. On their first meeting van der Post had told Charles that there was “a missing dimension” in the atmosphere created around him by his father, which immediately drew the younger man to him.
Under van der Post’s influence Charles developed a strong spiritual side, while Philip was a pragmatist An even greater barrier for father and son to surmount was Charles’s position as heir to the throne. The family structure would always prohibit a closeness between them, which Charles missed and his father did not
At Charles’s birth on 18 November 1948, the fountains in Trafalgar Square were made to run blue in honour of his sex, for Britain now had a male heir to the throne. The knowledge that he would one day be king dawned on him slowly, he once claimed, but “in the most inexorable sense.” He was only three when his mother became Queen. Her first duty and responsibility had to be to her subjects, not to him. He was taught to bow when she entered a room where he was, even if it was his own nursery. He was warned never to run to her, or grab at her, or to kiss her before she kissed him. Other people bowed to him and called him sir, and there was an unseen barrier between him and all others that he did not know how to penetrate.
An appointment had to be made to see either of his parents. Sometimes they appeared with their children in public, occasions for which both Charles and his sister Anne were carefully prepared. Private family gatherings with his parents at this time were marked by an edge of hostility that signalled the marriage difficulties they were experiencing. Disharmony had existed almost from Elizabeth’s accession when she did not rename Britain’s ruling house Mountbatten-Windsor, a great blow to Philip and his uncle Lord Mountbatten.*
Philip was furious. “I’m just an amoeba—a bloody amoeba!” he shouted, in the presence of several members of the Palace staff. Time did not placate his rancour. There were a number of years of near estrangement between him and his wife. Elizabeth was young—only twenty-five in 1952 when she became queen. The first five years of her reign were exceptionally hard as she learned to deal with the intricacies of monarchy and the intrigues and machinations of her courtiers. She loved her children but could only spend limited time with them, while Philip searched in frustration and futility to find a niche for himself. When he could not, he philandered and spent much of his time touring the world with his recently divorced, Australian seafaring friend, Michael Parker, who also enjoyed the intimate company of beautiful women.
Philip rankled at being a consort without a job and no power to make any independent decisions. He was still thought of as “Philip the Greek”* by court xenophobes and he was conscious of their suspicion of his motives. His love for his wife chilled even further by her refusal to grant him the title HRH Prince Philip, until 1957, when he was “grafted into the British royal tree.” His children, however, retained the surname Windsor.
Charles was twelve when his brother Andrew was born in 1960, and had spent four years boarding at Cheam, where his father, then an impoverished Greek prince in exile who spoke only rudimentary English, had also been sent at eight.
Philip’s mother, whose brother was Lord Louis Mountbatten, had been unhearing from childhood and turned to a religious order for solace. His father, Prince Andrew of Greece,* had escaped with his life in time to avoid being put on trial for treason as a royalist by the Revolutionary Committee that assumed the country in 1923, during Greece’s turbulent Civil War, when Philip was just two years old. Philip had been “the poor relation” of his mother’s family for the majority of his young life, having always to live on their generosity (mainly his two English-based uncles—Mountbatten and George, 2nd Marquis of Milford Haven), as did his parents and sisters.† His Viking good looks were his one tangible asset, and he used them to great advantage. With his uncle, the wildly ambitious Mountbatten, behind him, Philip began a deliberate, and highly successful, wooing of Elizabeth when she was a shy, chubby, insecure fourteen-year-old girl. George VI, who adored his daughter, never completely trusted Philip, and the Queen’s decision to fashion her dynasty as the House of Windsor and her reluctance to grant him the title of HRH Prince Philip, surely had their roots in her father’s wariness and her increasing knowledge of his “wandering eye.”
Spartan in his beliefs, Philip had felt that the rigour of life at Cheam had made a man of him and would do the same for his son. But the lonely young Prince found his five years at Cheam “a misery.” He did not make friends easily. His status formed a barrier between himself and his classmates, although it did not buy him immunity from the headmasters’ (there were two at Cheam) rod when he misbehaved—which wasn’t often as he had a terror of corporal punishment.
From his earliest memory Charles had been surrounded in public by the intrusive cameras of the over-zealous press. They waited for him at the school gates when he arrived each term, and were there when he left It was drilled into him that he must be polite, no matter how difficult the circumstances, and often the press and public pressures were intense.
He left Cheam “subdued and withdrawn, serious to the point of solemnity.” His father found his demeanour irksome. He would publicly rebuke Charles “for inconsequential behaviour.” At times he would mock him so cruelly that Charles “seemed to be foolish and tongue-tied in front of friends as well as family.”
To the “distress and embarrassment” of other members of the Royal Family and courtiers who were close to them, the young Prince was frequently brought to tears by his father’s inexplicably harsh, bantering gibes. Charles had artistic ability and could draw well; he was also interested in music, literature and botany. Philip believed such interests unmanly and never lost an opportunity to put down his son’s accomplishments in these areas. When Charles was ten or eleven, an observer remembers, there was “a whole table of people present. The tears welled into his eyes … and I thought how could [Philip] do that” Charles realized the contempt in which his father held him and it cut him deeply. What hurt him even more, perhaps, was his mother’s disregard of the humiliation to which his father subjected him. She did nothing to counteract her husband’s verbal abuse of their son.
The Queen had made a personal compromise. Since Philip had little to do with her public role, in the matter of their children she would “submit entirely to the[ir] father’s will.” There was great inequality in this regard. Philip’s favourite offspring was his only daughter Anne, and since she was a born horsewoman they had much in common. Charles on the other hand had no one to champion him.
After Cheam Charles was dispatched to Gordonstoun in northeast Scotland, which Philip had also attended. Later he regarded his years there as his “time of imprisonment.” A contemporary at Gordonstoun was the author William Boyd, who wrote a coruscating essay about his time at the school.* Life there, he claimed, was hard, and a “casual brutality” existed during the day. At night “a gang of thugs roamed the house beating up smaller boys, extorting food and money, pilfering, and creating an atmosphere of genuine terror.” Another former Gordonstoun pupil bitterly remembered the custom “to greet a new boy by taking a pair of pliers to their arms and twisting until the flesh tore open.” He added, “Boys were regularly trussed up in one of the wicker laundry baskets and left under the cold shower sometimes for hours.” Charles was no exception and was subjected to cruelties by older boys that were malicious “and without respite.” Otherwise he was left much alone. “Even to open a conversation with the heir to the throne,” Jonathan Dimbleby, Charles’s official biographer, has written, was “to face the charge of ‘sucking up’ and to hear the collective ‘slurping’ noises that denoted a toady and sycophant.”
His pleading letters to the Queen and his sister that life was “absolute hell … I simply dread going to bed because I get hit in the head all night long,” did not win him a reprieve. Although he had great respect for Dr. Eric Anderson, a young Gordonstoun master who encouraged him to perform in the school’s Shakespearean productions, his only confidant during the five years he spent at Gordonstoun was a sympathetic art teacher, Robert Waddell, who recognized his talent. Working under Waddell’s instruction, Charles developed into quite a good ceramicist. He also found that he could work with Waddell out of school hours, away from his tormentors.
Classical music appealed to him. He had heard little at home as his parents’ taste ran to patriotic, show and choral music. He made an unsuccessful attempt to play the trumpet in the school orchestra and then took up the cello. When at Sandringham in 1965, he visited Lady Fermoy and performed a piece for her. “He could have been a very good cellist,” she commented later, “because he’s such a sensitive musician and he made a lovely sound. At the end he said, ‘I’m hopeless.’ ”
“Not at all, sir,” she replied, adding diplomatically, “It takes much time to be a good cellist and you have so many other important matters to attend to.”
In February 1966, amid tremendous media coverage, Charles arrived in Australia to attend a new school, Timbertop, an outback offshoot of Geelong Church of England Grammar School in Victoria, a hundred miles to the north-east in the foothills of the Great Dividing Range and “a very long way from home.” He was there for one term. During his stay he performed over fifty engagements, as well as keeping up with a physically strenuous daily routine. He appeared officially at sheep-shearing events, film openings, polo matches, and was seen panning for gold, mustering cattle, chopping wood for war widows, and lunching at Government House.
It was a killing schedule, but he took to Australia and Timbertop, where he was not harassed or beaten and where he made friends. He returned to Gordonstoun in the autumn of 1966 for his final year, a time he looked to with despair and foreboding. But in actual fact Gordonstoun did not prove to be as dismal as the previous years. He sang with the choir, went on with his painting and potting, and he was given his own study-bedroom adjoining the flat occupied by the sympathetic Robert Waddell. None the less, he had no regrets when he finally left Gordonstoun for the last time a year later, and began what was to be a far more rewarding and fearless four terms at Trinity College, Cambridge.
His time at Trinity was interrupted by a term at the University College of Wales at Aberystwyth, a political decision on the part of Buckingham Palace. This was a time of fractious relations between Britain and Wales. Charles’s arrival was greeted with placards declaring “Go Home Charlie” in Welsh. A week later a bomb exploded in the street outside police headquarters in Cardiff.
The portrait of Charles that hung over Diana’s bed when she was at West Heath pictured him at his investiture as Prince of Wales on 1 July 1969 at Caernarfon Castle. He was nearly twenty, and the twenty-first Prince of Wales descending from a line that had begun with the future Edward n, who was invested as Prince of Wales in 1301. “For me,” Charles wrote in his diary that same day, “by far the most moving and meaningful moment came when I put my hands between Mummy’s and swore to be her liege man of life and limb and to live and die against all manner of folk—such magnificent medieval, appropriate words, even if they were never adhered to in those old days.”
What followed shortly thereafter was “a crash course in royal diplomacy and the function of the monarchy.” He made official visits to Australia and to the United States to meet President Nixon. Then he did a five-month stint with the Royal Air Force, followed by an attachment to the Royal Navy where he served first on the nuclear submarine HMS Churchill and then on HMS Norfolk. Nothing about his time in the Navy was normal: he had extra protection, and special arrangements were made to guard his clothes, his letters, his diary. A line of communication was set up between the Admiralty and the Palace in case a problem should arise. He was called “Prince Charles” by those of equal naval rank, and “sir” by those who weren’t. No matter what their rank, upon first meeting everyone had to bow and call him “Your Royal Highness.”
Once again, he was set apart and, isolated and alone, he began an intimate exchange of letters with Lord Mountbatten, whom he called “Grandpapa,” although Mountbatten was his great-uncle. The warmth he never received from his father came to him from Mountbatten, who had two daughters but no son and whose relationship with Philip had soured over the years. Philip was anything but happy about Mountbatten’s influence over Charles, sensing that “Uncle Dickie” might manipulate his son as once he had manipulated him.
After five years in the Navy and his affair with Camilla, Charles had been transformed into a more self-assured young man. But one problem took precedence over any other. As he had said poignantly in his graduation address from Cambridge University, “I do not really know what my role in life is … but somehow I must find one.” He was still looking for it. He remained deeply in love with Camilla but confused as he had also formed a close relationship with Kanga.
Diana was oblivious to the sophisticated arrangements of Charles’s private life. From what she read in the press, he dated one beautiful young woman after another and she told a friend, “If I’d had the chance Sarah had [with Prince Charles] I never would have blown it.” She remained girlishly romantic, yet with an underlying strength of purpose to her fantasizing.
Although the Spencers were no longer neighbours of the Royal Family, Robert Fellowes made the seasonal migrations with Jane from London to Windsor to Sandringham to Balmoral as a member of the Queen’s staff. And in January 1979, the same week that Lord Spencer came out of hospital after his stroke, Diana joined her sister and brother-in-law at Sandringham for a shooting weekend. Prince Charles was also present. They saw each other only briefly. He seemed happy to see her again, but also “as if wrestling with some private matter that deeply affected him.”
Even so, Charles never had the remoteness that marked his mother. Diana always had the feeling that the Queen was not truly interacting when there was an exchange between them, not that she ever had more than a few words at a time in conversation with her. Her questions were always innocuous and seemed rehearsed. “I hope your father is coming along well,” she once said.
“Yes, thank you, ma’am,” Diana replied.
“I understand you’ve been attending cooking school. What a good idea.”
“Well, it was really my mother’s suggestion, but I am enjoying it.”
A royal nod and the Queen turned away. Diana understood from Jane that the Queen enjoyed “unmalicious” gossip, but as royal reporter Anthony Holden comments, “Years of avoiding controversy have rendered her conversation rather bland. To meet her even briefly is to encounter someone so distinctly from another world that she might as well be a temporary (and very reluctant) visitor from Mars.”
On Diana’s eighteenth birthday, 1 July 1979, she received her inheritance from her great-grandmother Frances Work, and the wherewithal to buy her own flat in London. Her father had returned to Althorp but not in the best of health and was still having problems with his speech. Diana felt that he had “basically changed character. He was one person before and he was certainly a different person after [his long illness].” He had remained “estranged but adoring” she was to say, unaware of the contradiction within her statement. She bought a pleasant three-bedroom flat at 60 Coleherne Court, off the Old Brompton Road, for £60,000 and, with her mother’s help, began to improve and decorate it in a bright, modern style. She took as flatmates her old friends Carolyn Pride, Sophie Kimball and Philippa Coaker. A month later Sophie and Philippa moved out to be replaced by Anne Bolton and Virginia Pitman.
Her flatmates paid her £18 a week, shared the food and household expenses, and rotated housekeeping tasks. Diana tacked a sign to her bedroom door that read “Chief Chick” and, according to Carolyn, “always had the rubber gloves on as she clucked around the place.” Still unaware of what she wanted to do, Diana felt that although she was in limbo it would not be long before Mr. Right took her by the hand and led her into the future they were always meant to share. But she had to find something to occupy her time and supplement her income that would be more rewarding than cleaning the lavatories and ironing the sheets at Sarah’s flat.
She had not truly given up the idea of establishing a place for herself in the world of dance. With this in mind, she contacted Madame Betty Vacani, who ran the Vacani Dance School in South Kensington where many members of the Royal Family—the Queen, Princess Margaret, Prince Charles and Princess Anne—had taken lessons as children. Madame Vacani had once judged a dance contest at West Heath, which Diana had won. She was given an audition, interviewed and hired to teach the youngest class of preschoolers and accompany them on the piano.
She began work in mid-January 1979, and found it rewarding. She loved the children, and her ability to use her two main skills—piano and dance—productively gave her a new sense of self. For the next three months she was happier than anyone had seen her in a very long time. In March, she joined an old Norfolk friend, Mary-Ann Stewart-Richardson, for a weekend skiing in the French Alps, where she fell and tore the tendons in her left ankle. For three months she was in and out of plaster casts.
When she recovered, she went to see Victoria Wilson and Kay Seth-Smith, who knew her sister Jane and who ran the Young England Kindergarten in Pimlico, near Victoria station. They were impressed with the instant rapport she showed with the youngsters and hired her part-time. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday she would teach drawing, a little dancing and organize games and play times. Also Seth-Smith knew an American couple who needed a part-time nanny for Patrick, their toddler son. Diana was hired to work for the Robertsons on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
She was enjoying herself immensely. She had a place of her own, flatmates who were good company, and she was dating, mostly Old Etonians she had met skiing or at the family homes of friends. She never forgot her instinct that she must remain chaste. Rory Scott, one of her male friends during this period, says, “She was sexually attractive and the relationship was not a platonic one as far as I was concerned, but it remained that way. She was always a little aloof, you always felt there was a lot you would never know about her.” Scott was in the Army, a tall, attractive young man, who had appeared in a BBC documentary on Trooping the Colour. Diana laundered and ironed his shirts, proud that there was never a wrinkle to be seen.
But it was to the children at the kindergarten and Patrick that she gave her full attention and love. They made her feel needed, and prepared her for the family life she knew would one day be hers.
*Lord Louis Mountbatten, Earl of Burma (1900–1979), British admiral, great-grandson of Queen Victoria and Prince Philip’s uncle through his mother. He was governor-general of India in 1947-8. It was Mountbatten who engineered the marriage of his impecunious nephew to Elizabeth when she was heir to the Throne.
*Prince Philip, although born in Greece and the son of Prince Andrew of Greece, was a great-great grandson of Queen Victoria on his mother’s side. His parents both had strong Germanic roots. Greece won independence in 1832, but had to accept a Bavarian prince (Otto I) as King. Prince Andrew was his descendant. Philip’s mother, Alice, (1885–1969) known as Princess Andrew, was Mountbatten’s sister. Their parents were both German and their mother’s sister became the Empress Alexandra of Russia. So Prince Philip owed less to his Greek than his German roots.
*Prince Andrew of Greece (1882–1944). After Philip went to England, Prince Andrew was stateless and impoverished. He lived an empty life in exile in the South of France supported by women who were impressed by his title and charmed by his manner.
†Philip had three older sisters each of whom lived in Germany and were married to German princes who had served under Hitler during the Second World War. This had been a sticky public relations problem when Elizabeth and Philip were first engaged, but it somehow got brushed under the carpet.
*School Ties, Penguin, 1985.