ONCE SHE WAS married to Charles, Diana had expected media interest in her to abate and that she would go about her life with some modicum of privacy. This did not occur. The press hounded her every move. A day seldom passed without new pictures of her in the newspapers. Magazine covers with her image lined newsagents’ shelves. She was the most photographed woman in England and was quickly becoming the darling of the American media too, her face more familiar than those of established move stars. Her image raised the circulation of any newspaper or magazine. She had become a product eagerly sought after by media consumers.
Part of this was the romantic aura that clung to her history, part that she was extraordinarily photogenic. Like many film personalities, she was not actually beautiful, but the camera loved her face, the bone structure, the dazzling smile, the expressive eyes that gazed out with warm compassion and a lively twinkle. Her image spoke to people. She needed no words.
In effect she was selling the monarchy in the same way that a movie star sold their current film, or a rock singer their latest record. At no recent time had it been so popular, yet no help was forthcoming from the Palace on how Diana should handle her lack of privacy or the media attention.
Before the world knew of her coming motherhood (and, indeed, before her own suspicions had yet been confirmed), she and Charles went on a three-day official visit to Wales. Charles helped her through this public appearance, for which she had learned a little Welsh to use in the short speech she was to give at Caernarfon Castle.
The short tour, made in the royal train, was fraught with danger and difficulty. Nausea combined with the bulimia overtook her. There had been terrorist warnings, and at some stops she saw placards that read “Go Home, English Prince” by the Welsh Nationalist. At Bangor paint was sprayed on their limousine. Fire bombs were discovered at Pontypridd and Cardiff. A threatening letter was sent to the BBC, warning, “We will not forget 1969—Beware of Caernarfon.”* Wherever the royal couple appeared, marksmen lined the rooftops. Squads of uniformed police stood guard. Diana had been shaken by the recent news of the assassination of President Anwar Sadat by Muslim extremists opposed to his peace initiative with Israel. Suddenly she realized that her life and Charles’s might be at risk.
Everywhere they went, crowds pressed forward to get a glimpse of her, “holding out their hands and calling her name as if for a blessing,” Jonathan Dimbleby reported. Diana smiled resolutely. The press was ever-present: pictures of her surrounded by masses of well-wishers bombarded British and foreign newspapers daily. The schedule was gruelling and there was little time for either Diana or Charles to relax. They returned to the train exhausted each evening and with only a night’s respite before they had to start out again early the next morning.
When they reached the last stop of the tour, Gwynedd, in north-west Wales, Diana was sick, grey and gaunt. It was pouring with rain as their limousine drew up to the fortress-like entrance of Caernarfon Castle. Seeing the vast crowds waiting for them, the hovering police, and still suffering surging waves of nausea, Diana began to tremble and sob, “I can’t do it.” Both Charles and Anne Beckwith-Smith, Diana’s new lady-in-waiting, attempted to calm her. Then Charles said, “You’ve got to pull yourself together and do it.” And she did, his hand beneath her elbow for support as she took her first steps out of the car, security men rushing towards her with open umbrellas, Beckwith-Smith close behind her.
Once on the podium she gave her speech, and her Welsh words, correctly pronounced and carefully spoken, were greeted with enthusiastic applause. Then she and Charles went “walkabout” This was the first time that Diana had been exposed to this royal way of meeting more humble people. “I saw something almost miraculous overtake her,” one of the staff who accompanied her said. “It was pouring. But this didn’t seem to bother her. She stood to her full height and walked right over to an elderly man, removed her gloves and took his hand in hers. I’d never seen a royal do that before. ‘Your hands are freezing,’ she said. ‘So are mine. But yours are much worse. You must be soaked to the bone. Thank you so much for coming to see us.’ Then she leaned down, fully exposed to the rain as a little girl reached out to hand her a bouquet ‘What lovely flowers.’ She smiled. ‘Now you must get under some cover or you’ll ruin your pretty dress.’
“The Prince seemed to be taken by surprise and stood rather at an awkward distance as the Princess, so sick only moments before, ‘worked the crowd’, as we say, heedless of her own cover until, with her husband’s mandate, Security ushered her gracefully back to the car. Her hat was dripping, her face wet and she was shivering. But she was not the same terrified, crying woman she had been when she arrived at Caernarfon. It was simply amazing.”
Others report that she “stooped to talk gently with children, touched the blind, embraced the elderly …” It was clear that it was Diana, not Charles, that the crowds wanted most to see. Charles took it with humour when he was given flowers for his wife. “Diana, love,” he would say, with a self-deprecating smile, “over here,” when someone he greeted asked if they could shake hands with her. Neither knew that this was the harbinger of things to come. The spotlight was shifting from Charles to Diana. For now Charles was amused by it, and also proud of her.
The Welsh tour made a great impact on Diana. She had seen the warm look in people’s eyes when she touched someone’s hand or shoulder, how a simple remark could make a stranger smile.
The official announcement in early November of her pregnancy was met with joy by the country. The Queen hoped that the imminence of a child would help to settle Diana. Diana herself had greeted her pregnancy with fresh hope, but she had not anticipated the nausea she endured. Every time she stood up she was sick. She could not sleep or eat She grew so weak that she fainted several times. Never having had morning sickness, the Queen attributed Diana’s illness principally to her bulimia, which she did not understand and for which she blamed her daughter-in-law. Instead of gathering her to them and helping her, Diana’s in-laws were cool and without understanding. She was made to feel she was a nuisance, very un-royal to get sick or to faint in public (which Diana did one day at an official gathering, to the displeasure and censure of the Palace).
In late November, the family gathered at Sandringham. Diana’s sickness and her anxiety had reached a peak. Protocol demanded that despite her ill-health she eat with the Royal Family and leave the table only after the Queen’s departure. At dinner one evening nausea overcame her and she ran from the room. Later, she and Charles—who had not come after her—had a terrible row over this and she said something to the effect that she might as well kill herself for all he or his family cared. Charles bristled. Dressed to go riding, he brushed past her and into the corridor, Diana right behind him sobbing, threatening to throw herself down the stairs. Charles told her that she was being ridiculous and that she would do no such thing. He started to descend. Diana rushed to stop him and catapulted down several steps.
The Queen appeared from a room below, horrified to see Diana sprawled on the stairs (the Queen was “shaking,” Diana said later), fearful that she might have injured herself and her baby. Family members and staff filled the corridor. No one seemed to know what to do. Charles muttered that she was “crying wolf,” and went out Princess Margaret came quickly to Diana’s aid and helped her up, the doctor was called and confirmed that Diana and the baby were unhurt A sedative was administered and she spent the rest of the day in bed.
Such a melodramatic scene had never been played out at Sandringham before, and the only way the family knew how to deal with it was to ignore it The incident was simply not discussed. For weeks, Charles hardly spoke to Diana. “Things had degenerated so that he never wanted to be in the same room as her, unless someone was there with him,” one courtier has been quoted as saying. Apart from her domestic staff, her bodyguard, Anne Beckwith-Smith, Oliver Everett, who was now Diana’s private secretary and comptroller, and Princess Margaret Diana was more or less isolated from the court, who had allied themselves to those who held the power over their jobs—Prince Charles, the Queen or Prince Philip, who openly expressed his disgust at Diana’s “charade.”
Diana, still at Buckingham Palace as she waited for work to be completed on their home in Kensington Palace, felt the full force of this icy wind of rejection and it chilled her to the core.
Kensington Palace is a complex of many apartments, some grand, some not so grand, others surprisingly humble. It is owned by the Crown and all the accommodation is grace-and-favour. Over the years it has been home to well over a hundred members of the Royal Family. Queen Victoria was born there in 1819; Prince Philip’s mother, Princess Andrew, and his grandmother, the Dowager Marchioness of Milford Haven, were long-time occupants; the Queen’s aunt, Marina, Duchess of Kent, and her three children, Edward, Michael and Alexandra, moved in shortly after the death of the Duke in an air crash. Prince and Princess Michael of Kent lived there, as did Princess Margaret and her two children, the elderly Princess Alice, Dowager Duchess of Gloucester, and her son, Richard, Duke of Gloucester and his family.
In the 1930s through to the 1960s, insiders referred to Kensington Palace as the “aunt-heap,” a bit of a royal rest home; and there was much backbiting among the residents (who also included current and retired members of the Royal Household who lived in staff quarters and cottages in the grounds). In general, the occupants were much younger than in previous years and as there were numerous children of various ages, the courtyard of Kensington Palace rang with the sound of their voices and their music.
Kensington Palace was originally the country home of the then Earl of Nottingham, who sold it to William III in 1689 as a country retreat for the monarch. Christopher Wren designed the Orangery for Queen Anne. Later Grinling Gibbons decorated the interior with carved panels, fluted columns and flower-bedecked archways. It was only in the early years of the nineteenth century, when its 274 acres of parkland were opened to the public, that it was divided into apartments. Since then the large brick building with its eye-catching green slate roof had undergone many additions and improvements, but ti still showed its age. The plumbing was often sluggish, hot water unreliable, and the heating inadequate, unless augmented by electric fires.
Despite these last drawbacks, KP—as Diana soon called it—was grand and she was thrilled to be moving there. Highgrove had two drawbacks where she was concerned: its proximity to Camilla and the horsy set, and its distance from London and the urban life she preferred.
The Queen had given Charles and Diana two apartments (numbers 8 and 9) to combine into a large one. This gave them an L-shaped, three-storey home (kitchens and domestic staff quarters on the lower ground floor, reception rooms at ground level, and bedrooms and family space on the first floor), with twenty-five principal rooms and numerous subsidiary ones. Their nearest neighbours were Prince and Princess Michael of Kent and their children. Best of all, Diana’s sister Jane and her husband had been given a grace-and-favour cottage, the Old Barracks, in the grounds.
Diana said later that decorating her London home during her pregnancy saved her sanity. She had found she had an eye for colour, design and the use of space when she assisted Charles at Highgrove, and she hired interior designer Dudley Poplak, a South African who had helped her mother and her sister Jane with their homes. Poplak had also overseen the final decoration of Highgrove. For the country, Diana had chosen bright floral chintzes for the sofas and chairs, and pastels for the walls, giving a cheery but elegant look. The rooms at Kensington Palace were far grander in size and detail than at Highgrove and called for a somewhat different approach.
One problem she encountered was using the many expensive, but not always co-ordinated, wedding gifts that she and Charles had received, and the antiques and paintings the Queen had allocated them from her private collection. Charles allowed Diana a fairly free hand but insisted that grey carpet with the Prince of Wales feathers was laid in the expansive hall. Diana claimed it was too intimidating, announcing the occupant’s royal title, as might well be done in his Buckingham Palace office, but which she believed set the wrong tone for their home.
The largest reception room could comfortably accommodate seventy-five guests and up to ten footmen to serve champagne and hors d’oeuvres. It contained a Broadwood grand piano, salmon pink sofas, and yellow silk wall coverings, with a magnificent Aubusson rug. There was a smaller drawing room for gatherings of up to twelve, a “family room” with television and a fine music system, and a well-shelved library, as well as Diana’s office suite, staff rooms, and two dining rooms—one for the family, the other for dinner parties. The main dining room boasted a handsome round eighteen-century mahogany table that comfortably sat sixteen.
A beautiful Georgian staircase curved up to the first floor where the master bedroom held a magnificent oversized mahogany four-poster bed (originally made for the massive bulk of King Edward VII). Off this bedroom were two bathrooms and two dressing rooms, each equipped with a single bed—Charles often slept in his. Then there was Diana’s sitting room, the cosiest room in the house. A large circular mirror over the handsome fireplace reflected the soft floral designs on the sofas. Several circular tables covered in floor-length silk of robin’s egg blue, held a multitude of silver frames in assorted sizes containing pictures of all her loved ones. There were cabinets for her favourite collections; a colourful display of Herend glass animals, her stuffed animals, and children’s books, including Grandmother Spencer’s copy of Grimms‘ Fairy Tales. A small lady’s desk was stocked with her personal stationary embossed with a crown and her name Diana beneath it She had developed the habit from youth of writing a thank-you note to her host as soon she arrived home from a small dinner or meeting with a friend.
Her wardrobes were state-of-the-art, designed for the meticulous person she was, every item of clothing co-ordinated and hung or shelved impeccably, never put away unless freshly cleaned, pressed or in the case of her dozens of pairs of shoes, buffed or just returned from repair if they were in any way worn. However confused Diana was at times about her life, there was incredible order to the material side of her existence. This was one place where order would reign, and there would be no unwanted surprises.
Israel Zohar, later commissioned to paint a portrait of Diana for the Russian Hussars, recalled his vivid impression of the Waleses’ home in Kensington Palace, its comfortable elegance and the way Diana had integrated the historic antiques and paintings. It was “like seeing the chain of what makes the culture of a nation, of humanity grow and develop through art, through furniture.”
What is amazing is that Diana was only twenty-one at the time. True, she had Poplak to guide her, but every final decision was hers. It was a job extremely well done, one of which Charles and her in-laws could have well been proud. “No one gave me any credit,” she later complained to a close older friend. “No one. Not Charles. Not the Queen.”
Charles preferred Highgrove, and he spent many weekends there alone. Diana, who suffered with nausea almost to the end of her pregnancy, remained in London working on the decoration of their home, especially the nursery wing. Five weeks before she was due to give birth, she and Charles moved into Kensington Palace. It did not keep him in London at weekends, so Diana spent her time with Jane, and prepared for the baby’s arrival.
From the day the pregnancy had been announced, newsmen waited daily for a photo-opportunity wherever they thought she might turn up, at the back gates of Buckingham Palace, her hairdresser’s salon and outside her favourite shops. The country was seized with Diana fever. The press commented on how thin she was. On the one hand there was concern for her health, on the other a complete disregard for any right to privacy she might want or need.
In February, she and Charles had flown to the Bahamas for a much-needed holiday. They found themselves seldom out of the view of the press, who used long-range lenses to take pictures of them sunbathing and swimming—Diana in a bikini at five months pregnant. Charles was furious, Diana was in a terrible state. In her private apartments she was watched constantly by staff and security, who were never more than a few feet away from her at all times. Someone was even stationed outside her bedroom door at night. (“They’re even checking me in the loo,” she complained, to a close member of her staff.) The claustrophobic nature of her life, the loss of her freedom, was almost more than she could bear. She turned to Anne Beckwith-Smith for understanding, for even Jane was too close to the court for Diana to trust with her deepest feelings. Her parents were insensitive to her plight: they wanted her to make no waves with Charles or her in-laws.
In fact, Diana’s husband and her mother-in-law had more serious matters on their minds than Diana’s problems, however difficult they were for her. Great Britain was at war. On 2 April 1982, Leopoldo Galtieri, President of Argentina and commander of its army, landed thousands of troops on the Falkland Islands and reclaimed them as national territory. The Falklands are bleak, rocky moorlands, windswept, rain-drenched, and home to just over two thousand people. Located about 350 miles off the coast of Argentina, the Falkland Islands were seen by that country as important to their strategic defence. English residents, however, considerably far out-number Argentinian. Great Britain moved swiftly: on 21 May five thousand British Marines and paratroops landed, Prince Andrew among them. Charles, as colonel-in-chief of six regiments and the Army Air Corps “felt extremely guilty and frustrated” that he could not be with the troops. His schedule remained filled with the usual work for the Prince of Wales Trust and the obligatory appearances, but he made time for letters to be written to the families of men who were reported injured or lost and fastidiously read the communiques on the progress of the campaign sent to him by the Palace.
It was a short—just ten weeks—but brutal war. Great Britain had lost 257 men by the time Galtieri surrendered the island garrison on 14 June. Scores of others were brought home on stretchers, seriously injured, and Charles was patron of the South Atlantic Fund, which gave its support to the bereaved and injured. Nor was Diana, as Jonathan Dimbleby suggests in his biography of Prince Charles, oblivious to the solemnity of what was occurring in the country and within her husband’s family. According to members of her staff, she wrote to many who had met with tragedy caused by the war and was genuinely grieved by their misfortune.
In the final weeks of her pregnancy her obstetrician considered a Caesarean birth: 21 June was the date they settled on as it “would not interfere with Charles’s polo schedule,” but when she arrived on the previous evening at St. Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, and had settled into the Lindo wing, security thick in the corridors, the decision was to induce labour instead. Diana spent sixteen hours in labour before she had an epidural spinal injection which eased her pain. At 9:03 p.m., with Charles at her side, she gave birth to a seven-and-a-half-pound baby boy.
Charles was euphoric. He grasped her hand, kissed her brow and held his son. When he left the hospital an hour later, the massive crowds outside went “berserk with excitement,” and greeted him with a rousing chorus of “For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow.” He grinned, waved and walked with a spring in his step to his car.
Diana had been aware of his close presence during her labour and filled her with renewed hope for their marriage. Their son, who was named William Arthur Philip Louis, was healthy and strong of lung. Diana was happier than she could ever remember being. She was a mother, a role she had always wanted to play. When a member of her close family came to see her the next morning she cried. “Happy tears,” she told them, “the first ones I can remember.”
She was so excited by having a healthy son, that it was some time before she grasped that she was the mother of a future King of England.
*Two members of the extremist group Meibion had blown themselves up the morning of 1 July 1969, when Charles had been invested as Prince of Wales at Caernarfon Castle.