CHARLES HAD LEFT early. Diana was alone once again in her unfamiliar bedroom, with no television, record player or radio. The telephone sat silently by her bed. She yearned to call the girls at Coleherne Court, but didn’t like to. In parting, Charles had said she must get some rest so that she would be prepared for the next day when the announcement would be made. She did not want him to leave when he did, but was too intimidated by their surroundings to speak out.
Diana felt, she later said, as if she were being “swept into a concealed abyss.” Her role was still unclear, although Adeane had warned her not to speak to the press unless it was under his aegis. She and Charles would make their first public appearance together before the cameras and she would wear the bright blue suit with the Eton jacket and the blue and white print blouse that she had purchased at Harrods the previous day. Blue had always suited her. She was attuned to colours; different ones created different moods for her. Blue was a romantic, peaceful colour in all its shades, for it reminded her of the sea and the sheltering sky.
The bed was turned down, a pair of pyjamas draped across it. On the bedside table was the novel she had been reading before leaving the flat and had taken with her. She fell asleep with the lamp on. When she awoke it was morning, the light was out and the curtains had been drawn back. It was nine a.m. and the day did not look promising. There was a tea tray on the bureau and the elderly maid was beside her bed with several of the morning papers. There was also a crested envelope.
The letter was from Adeane informing her that an announcement by the Queen and Prince Philip of her engagement to His Royal Highness would be made by Lord Maclean, the Lord Chamberlain, at exactly eleven o’clock that morning. A news release had also been prepared and would be delivered to television, radio and press at the precise same time. However, The Times had somehow managed to scoop the Palace. The maid had placed it on top of the papers. The front-page headline was the engagement news and there were photographs of Charles and herself.
A short schedule was enclosed in Adeane’s letter with the advice that Young England would be notified as soon as the announcement was made that she would not be returning to resume her duties. A car would take her from Clarence House to Buckingham Palace at eleven fifteen where she would meet with His Royal Highness for forty-five minutes. At twelve, they would attend a press conference where she would be expected to answer some questions. She would be advised about this beforehand.
The sun broke through the clouds just before she left for Buckingham Palace. She was escorted there by Paul Officer who, she learned, was to be her personal bodyguard. He was an experienced policeman, well educated and rather philosophical.
“Do you have a gun?” she asked him.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Am I in danger?”
“I hope not. But it’s best not to second-guess those things,” he replied.
Charles was less reserved than he had been the previous night. He slipped his arm around her waist, told her she looked lovely, that all she had to do was be herself during the interview, but not to venture much more than a simple answer to questions presented directly to her. They were joined in his office by Adeane and Charles’s secretarial assistants—Jenny Allen, Claire Potts, Pauline Pears, Julia “Lulu” Malcolm, Sonia Palmer and Philippa Tingey. Pink champagne was brought out to toast the newly engaged couple as Charles slipped on Diana’s engagement ring, the sapphire she had selected now encircled by diamonds. It was the first piece of jewellery he had given her and she kept looking at it with amazement
The press conference was held on the garden steps of Buckingham Palace. Diana smiled winningly for the camera, but Charles was stiffer.
“Are you in love?” the BBC interviewer asked.
“Of course!” Diana asserted.
“Yes. Whatever love is,” Charles modified.
If Diana was taken aback by Charles’s qualified answer, she managed to hide it. As the week progressed she had to hide an increasing sense of fear, puzzlement and insecurity. To add to this, she had been horrified when she saw herself on the BBC interview. She looked chubby, her blue suit was all wrong and she had been photographed at unattractive angles that made her look shorter than she was, to accentuate Charles’s height
Less than a fortnight after the announcement of their engagement, Charles departed on what he later termed a “much regretted” expedition, for it had not been the right time to leave Diana to face the press alone. The night before he left Diana was in his study with him when his private telephone rang.
It was Camilla, and Diana was unnerved by Charles’s long, muffled conversation with her. His conspiratorial tone alarmed her: something was going on, but she was not sure what it was and was afraid to confront him.
She sat quietly, her eyes avoiding his, but the incident caused her great anguish.
The next day, wearing a bright red coat (red for courage), Diana went to see Charles off and could not control her sobs. The press thought she couldn’t bear to be parted from him but it had more to do with the intimacy with which he had spoken to Camilla the previous night. Diana felt now that she was losing Charles before they could reach the altar.
This was not so. Charles was committed to their future together. But something alarming had occurred. For several years both Camilla and Kanga had been his mistresses, but his relationship with Camilla, whom he now realized was his true love, had intensified since his proposal to Diana—who could not help but sense a change in Charles. He still believed, though, that he would be able to have the best of both words with Camilla as his mistress and a compliant Diana as his wife.
Diana was not yet certain that Charles and Camilla were lovers, just that Camilla was exerting all her seductive powers over him to make it happen. This, Diana tried to convince herself, was something she would put a stop to. It seemed to her that she held the high cards in playing out her hand. Camilla was much older, married, a mother, and not nearly as attractive as herself. She could not accept that Camilla held the trump card: her sexual hold on Charles.
While Charles was away, Diana worked hard to overcome her anxieties. She kept herself busy with the wedding plans. However, as time passed and Charles rarely telephoned, she conveyed her feelings to one of her former flatmates, who was alarmed at how thin Diana had grown since the announcement of her engagement
“She confirmed to me that she was fighting bulimia,” her friend says. “I told her she had to be more frank with Charles, tell him his lack of attention disturbed her. I knew nothing about Camilla and she did not mention that there was another woman in his life. I just thought he must be a terribly cold person, and as I knew how needy Diana was, I did not come away with a good feeling about their future together.”
In the final days of his tour, Charles flew to Venezuela to discuss the establishment of a new United World College. His last stop was Williamsburg, Virginia where he gave a speech at William and Mary College, referring in it to the marriage of his forebears, William and Mary. The latter, when told she was to marry this man twelve years her senior, collapsed into tears. “There is also a twelve-year gap between myself and my fiancee, but there, ladies and gentlemen,” he emphasized, “the similarity comes to an abrupt halt”
His official biographer, Jonathan Dimbleby, writes of Charles’s state of mind at the time of the Australia-United States tour, “If his betrothal to Diana Spencer was hardly the love match for which his friends had hoped, that she had perhaps wanted and which the nation certainly assumed, he was determined that their marriage should succeed.”
Shortly before Charles’s departure Diana had been moved from Clarence House to rooms in Buckingham Palace. They looked much like a grand suite in one of the old hotels, like Claridges or the Ritz, except for the family portraits that graced the walls. If Diana had thought that proximity would bring her closer to the Queen, or that the Palace would now help her adjust to her new situation, she was wrong. She was, as she later said, “just pushed into the fire,” left much to her own devices and basically alone, except for Paul Officer and members of Charles’s staff who answered the hundreds of daily letters she received.
London was already in a state of royal wedding fever. Diana received up to thirty requests a day from reporters who wanted to interview her. Whenever she left the Palace, a troop of photographers and journalists thrust microphones and cameras at her. She yearned for the comfort and privacy of Coleherne Court, and for the friends with whom she felt safe and in whom she could confide. She involved herself in the design of her wedding gown, and chose her trousseau, which she found depressing because she felt “as fat as butter.” Staff at the Palace noted that she was not eating and David and Elizabeth Emanuel, who were designing her dress, had to keep taking it in as her weight fell.
Seamstress Nina Missetzes was present for all the fittings. “She was so sweet, so shy,” Missetzes recalled. “When she first came to see me, she didn’t want to take off her clothes so I could take her measurements. I told her if she didn’t, the dress would be too big, so she did what I asked. As I was pinning the pattern to her, I could tell it was very new to her to be fitted.” So was living in a palace where everyone had their own suites, seldom met even in the corridors, and had to make appointments to see each other. It took Diana a full five minutes to walk from her suite to the gardens. And wherever she went Detective Officer accompanied her.
The Queen and Prince Philip did not invite her to tea, nor did they include her in any intimate family dinners. She saw them rarely, although the Queen asked after her, generally through a staff member, every few days. Her accommodation did not contain a kitchen. Food was brought up from the kitchens through the maze of corridors and reheated on warming plates at mealtimes when she was in.
Carolyn Pride became alarmed when she saw her: Diana’s waistline had narrowed by six inches in six weeks. “She went to live at Buckingham Palace and then the tears started,” Carolyn recalled. “The little thing got so thin I was worried about her. She wasn’t happy, she was suddenly plunged into all this pressure and it was a nightmare for her.”
Spring came suddenly and prematurely at the beginning of March, and there was a fortnight of almost summer heat. The trees came into leaf, and all London seemed a-quiver with the preparations for the wedding, now scheduled for 29 July. Diana felt frightened, suddenly trapped.
She had decided to meet Camilla for lunch. This did not prove easy to arrange, for the restaurant had to be made secure. Finally, a small Italian restaurant in Sloane Street was chosen. When Diana arrived Camilla was waiting for her. At thirty-two, Camilla seemed older than her years, a country matron, while Diana looked like the teenage debutante she might have been.
After Camilla had examined Diana’s engagement ring and they had ordered lunch, she leaned across the table. “You are not going to hunt, are you?” she asked.
Diana was startled. It seemed a strange question.
“You are not going to hunt when you go and live at Highgrove, are you?” Camilla asked again.
“No,” Diana answered.
Camilla sat back in her chair. “I just wanted to know,” she said, suddenly at ease. Hunting was the sport Camilla shared with Charles, and she was making certain that they would still be able to meet without Diana’s interference at the various hunts that took place in Gloucestershire.
When Charles returned from his tour Diana’s fears dissipated. Fully informed by his staff of the nerves that had engulfed his fiancée once she was alone, he spent as much time as he could with her, and was gentle and forbearing. But his commitments left him less free time for her than either of them would have wanted. To his credit, he now saw how vulnerable she was and he became somewhat fatherly towards her, which seemed to calm her. He was, perhaps, more in love with her during this period than he ever had been or ever would be.
Lady Susan Hussey, a lady-in-waiting to the Queen and a trusted confidant of Charles, was recruited to help acquaint Diana with royal protocol. Oliver Everett, a career diplomat at the Foreign Office who had been assistant private secretary to the Prince of Wales from 1978 to 1980, sacrificed his own advancement in the Foreign Office to advise and instruct Diana further in the business of being royal. Charles forfeited some of his office space at the Palace so that Frances Shand Kydd could come in on three afternoons a week to help Diana with some of the wedding details and, with Anna Harvey of Vogue, her new wardrobe needs.
The bride’s guest list was constantly redrawn, with some names added, others removed. There was a crisis over the inclusion of Barbara Cartland’s: Frances found Raine’s flamboyant mother “distressing,” and in the end, Diana’s step-grandmother was not invited, which left a new chill between Raine and Diana. “If Johnnie had spoken to Diana about this, I am sure she would have rescinded this snub to his wife’s mother. But he was prone not to intervene in any of the wedding arrangements,” a member of the family said.
The Palace was having its own problems with the wedding list, which had to be kept down to 1,500 guests (later it would extend to 2,500). There were some diplomatic situations regarding which heads of state must or could not be invited. There were the courtiers, some of whom would be greatly offended if they could not be accompanied by their husband or wife. And there were those who had served the Royal Family through the years, the Prince of Wales’s staff and personal friends, Wales and Duchy of Cornwall representatives, and the limited number, but very important and a difficult choice, of ordinary men and women of the realm whose work had earned them the honour of attending the wedding.
The Queen would pay for most of it Charles was responsible for the flowers and the music. The Spencers would pay for the wedding gown and Diana’s wardrobe. The government covered various ceremonial expenses, which included fireworks on the night beforehand. There was a huge debate over whether they should be married at Westminster Abbey (the Queen’s choice) or St. Paul’s (Charles and Diana’s). The last time a Prince of Wales was married in St Paul’s Cathedral had been in 1501 when Arthur, eldest son of Henry VII, married the fifteen-year-old Katharine of Aragon.
“I’ve always longed to have a musical wedding,” the Prince of Wales told the BBC’s Angela Rippon. “One of the reasons I particularly wanted to be married in St. Paul’s is that … the whole acoustic is so spectacular with ten or eleven seconds after sound, after note.”
The selection of the music was something that Diana could share with Charles, and she insisted on having one hymn special to her, “I Vow To Thee My Country.” Sir David Willocks, director of the Royal College of Music, worked with them in choosing the rest of the music. Charles made one demand, that the music to which they would walk up the incredibly long aisle of St Paul’s should be something stirring and dramatic, “Because if you have something rather quiet you start hearing your ankles cricking.” There would be three orchestras, the Bach choir and the great Maori soprano Kiri Te Kanawa. Thinking of the emotional impact of all that glorious music in such a grand and historical cathedral, Charles added, “I shall, I think, spend half the time in tears.” Diana had been advised to let Charles do most of the talking and so she was almost monosyllabic in her responses. Nowhere in the interview did Charles acknowledge her unusual musical knowledge. She appeared not to notice.
Diana was trying desperately hard to avoid any show of emotional feeling. Now that she was active she was in happier spirits and eager to please. She worked diligently every day with Lady Susan Hussey on the royal wave, how to enter and leave a room, to exit from a car, sit on a podium, smile sedately, look at people with steady regard—“the royal gaze.” She also practised walking down the aisle of St Paul’s without stumbling on her train.
Oliver Everett taught her how to address heads of foreign states and suggested she study English royal history, on which he gave her daily tests. For the first time she learned her husband-to-be’s full name—HRH Prince Charles Philip Arthur George Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester, Duke of Cornwall, Duke of Rothesay, Earl of Carrick and Baron of Renfrew, Lord of the Isles and Great Steward of Scotland—and she was made to write “Diana” over and over again to develop a stronger signature. To relieve the tension she asked if a former piano teacher, Lily Snipp and her ballet mistress, Wendy Vickers, from her West Heath days, could give her lessons at the Palace. “She lived for ballet,” Miss Snipp explained, and these lessons became escape from the pressures of life at the Palace as a soon-to-be royal bride.
But Diana had a strong mind of her own, which showed in her insistence on having a say in her clothes. The Emanuels were working on her wedding gown and also designing the gown she was to wear at her first formal appearance with Prince Charles at Goldsmiths Hall for a traditional charity gala in aid of the Royal Opera House. Diana was determined to make a distinctive mark here as a mature, fashion-minded woman. Against the Emanuels’ instincts she selected a black silk taffeta, strapless gown with a plunging décolletage. She had insisted that the gown be a surprise for Charles. When she appeared at his study door moments before they were to depart, he was furious. The Royal Family, he told her, may wear black only to a funeral, a lesson Lady Susan Hussey had overlooked. And they never, ever appeared in public with that amount of cleavage on display. He told her to change.
“I haven’t another to wear,” she protested, “so I either wear this gown or I don’t go.”
Charles had to back down.
When he stepped out of their limousine at Goldsmiths Hall ahead of Diana, he said to the waiting press, “Wait till you get an eyeful of this.” There was a shocked silence as Diana was helped out of the car then stood erect, looking unbelievably glamorous and unexpectedly seductive. Perhaps not acceptably royal by Windsor rules but extraordinarily regal. At one point in the evening, Princess Grace of Monaco accompanied her to the ladies’ room where Diana confided how horrified she was by her faux pas. “Don’t worry,” Monaco’s movie-star princess replied, “it will get a lot worse.”
It did.
As the pressures of the wedding mounted, Diana became increasingly edgy. Her twentieth birthday on 1 July was celebrated with a small party in Charles’s apartment. He gave her a beautiful matched set of leather luggage ornamented with the fleur-de-lis and “Princess of Wales” in gold. The following day Camilla fell ill and Diana learned through one of Charles’s staff that he had sent her flowers with a warm greeting, and that they always used the initials G, for Gladys, and F, for Fred, when they corresponded. Diana could not avoid the implications of that.
She confronted Charles and insisted that Camilla’s name be taken off the invitation list to the ball the Queen was giving two nights before the wedding, the service at St. Paul’s and the wedding reception. He refused. Camilla, he explained, was an old and close friend (he had not admitted that they had been lovers) and her husband was a loyal courtier and in charge of the wedding route to St. Paul’s and back to the Palace. Charles was adamant that the Parker Bowleses attend everything. Diana left his study in tears. Jane, who was staying with her, tried to calm her down.
“I don’t think I can go through with it,” Diana cried.
“Well, bad luck, Duch,” Jane replied. “Your face is already on the tea towels so you’re too late to chicken out!”
The next day Lily Snipp wrote in her daily journal, “Lady Diana looking very tired … counting how many days of freedom are left to her. Rather sad. Masses of people outside of Palace … Lady Diana said, ‘In twelve days I will no longer be me.’ ”
On 24 July, Diana was in the office she shared with Charles’s finance officer, Michael Colbourne, when a package arrived from the royal jewellers addressed to HRH The Prince of Wales. Certain that it was a gift for her, she begged Colbourne to open it while she was there. Colbourne refused quite firmly. Diana picked it up and opened it herself.
Inside was a gold bracelet with a blue enamel disc and the letters F and G entwined. No sooner had she lifted it out of the box than Charles entered the room. There was a terrible scene; and Charles asked one of his female staff to see “Lady Diana to her rooms.” He added something about pre-wedding stress. That afternoon she had her last session with Nina Missetzes. The gown had to be taken in another inch and the fitter recalled, “Lady Diana got very emotional and cried.”
Diana was now feeling the full pressure of royal life. There was hardly a moment in the day that was not scheduled. “One minute you’ve got the King and Queen of Sweden coming to give you their wedding present of four brass candlesticks, the next minute you get the president of somewhere else,” she explained. And every night there was a dinner party in honour of some visiting royal relative.
On Thursday afternoon, 23 July, Charles and Diana had been at a Palace garden party for 3,500 disabled people and their helpers. Diana came alive. These were people with whom she fully empathized and were easy to talk to. The clouds burst with a torrential summer shower shortly after they arrived and the Queen and other members of the Royal Family were guided to shelter. But Diana insisted that she and Charles press on, noting that their guests did not have any shelter other than an umbrella and that for them this was one of the great moments of their lives. She shook hands and joked with their guests: she commiserated with a one-armed veteran on how difficult it must be to take a bath, especially when the soap slipped. Her Palace guard turned pale, but the old soldier was greatly moved. “You understand,” he said.
“Something should be invented to help you. I’ll work on that,” she said, and smiled.
She was the undoubted star of the show. On the following morning she and Charles arrived separately at Tidworth Garrison in Hampshire to visit the Cheshire Regiment, of which the Prince was colonel-in-chief. While he went off to look at machine-guns, Diana talked with Army wives and their children. The next day she did much the same with Navy families near Petersfield. At lunch she and Charles attended the annual reunion of survivors of HMS Kelly, the destroyer once commanded by Earl Mountbatten.
After lunch, they drove in Charles’s open-top Aston Martin to a polo match where he was to play for the Navy against the Army. Thirty or forty photographers were present, some with telephoto lenses that “resembled naval guns from Jutland,” concentrating on taking photographs of her. As they pressed closer, she leaped up from her seat and, head down, walked quickly to the back of the stables. Charles rushed to her and led her to his car, where they were joined by Lady Penelope Romsey. Diana burst into tears, and the two women were driven to Broadlands.
With the wedding arrangements, her full immersion into public life and the continuing personal drama over Camilla, it was no wonder that Diana was on edge. The Queen and the Queen Mother were not unaware of problems between Charles and Diana, and the royal apartments at both Clarence House and Buckingham Palace were astir with concern that Diana might bolt Equal care was taken to ensure that the media did not discover that anything was wrong. It was made plain to them that Lady Diana was suffering the pre-wedding nerves of most brides.
On the Sunday, three days before the wedding, Diana walked hand in hand with Charles to the paddock at Smith’s Lawn, Windsor, where he was playing polo for England against Spain. She looked pale, but was on her best public behaviour. She gave a well-practised wave to the 20,000-strong crowd as they applauded her arrival in the Royal Pavilion, then turned to Charles to give him a good-luck peck on the cheek as he rode off to play.
That afternoon, at the private chapel in Windsor Castle, Princess Anne’s baby was christened Zara Anne Elizabeth. Among her godparents were Camilla and Andrew Parker Bowles. There was some consternation that neither Diana nor Charles attended the christening, but it was explained that they could not fit it into their overcrowded schedule.
A few hours later the bridal couple arrived at St. Paul’s Cathedral for the wedding rehearsal. Diana donned a mock veil of old net curtaining and practised her slow march up the aisle, which would not be easy due to the weight of the dress and its train and the fact that she would be taking the walk with her father who was still not too steady on his feet When Charles arrived he appeared to be in a buoyant mood as he waved nonchalantly at the massive crowds who were waiting to see him. Then, he missed his footing and tripped on a step, to be grabbed and kept from falling by a bodyguard.
Inside, a television camera crew was setting the lights for the filming of the wedding. The glare was blinding, the heat stifling. Diana appeared edgy as Elizabeth Emanuel placed the mock veil over her head, and she started slowly down the aisle to the magnificent altar. She repeated this about six times, while cameramen showed her where their cameras would be located, and clergy told her where she must stand at the altar and when she must speak. She managed her part of the rehearsal, then retreated to a corner of the cathedral where she collapsed in sobs. Sarah Armstrong-Jones rushed to her side, followed by Charles, and she calmed herself before leaving hand in hand with him.
That night the Queen gave a dinner at Buckingham Palace for ninety guests, mostly members of the Royal Family and foreign dignitaries. Afterwards there was a reception and dance for 1,500 guests with music played by the Three Degrees, Charles’s favourite pop group. Diana was in high spirits: Camilla and her husband were not there. She did not know, of course, that Prince Philip had elicited a vow from his son that he would not see Camilla for five years after he and Diana were married and that he would be a true husband to Diana. Charles had undertaken to do this and had told Camilla. She had agreed to suspend their physical relationship, but did not see how they could avoid seeing each other as friends—or why they should.
Diana danced and danced. She wore a magnificent shell pink ball gown, with an exquisite pearl and diamond necklace, an engagement gift from the Queen. Princess Margaret attached a balloon to her diamond tiara, “Prince Andrew tied one to the tails of his dinner jacket.” Charles Spencer, just down from Eton, recalled bowing at a uniformed waiter because “there were so many royal people there, I was in automatic bowing mood. I bowed and he looked surprised. Then he asked me if I wanted a drink.”
“Everybody got terribly drunk [but not the Queen, Charles or Diana, and certainly not First Lady Nancy Reagan],” recalled a guest. “It was a blur, a glorious, happy blur.”
The next day Diana moved back to Clarence House whence she would go to her wedding in the famous Glass Coach. Charles sent her a package containing a gold ring engraved with the Prince of Wales feathers and a note that read: “I’m so proud of you and when you come up I’ll be there at the altar for you tomorrow. Just look ’em in the eye and knock ’em dead.”
Jane was to spend the night with her at Clarence House. Supper was served to them on trays in Diana’s sitting room. Diana stuffed herself, then forced herself to vomit. Jane helped her through it, but viewed the incident lightly. It was just Diana being Diana.