BY 1989 DIANA’S affair with Hewitt had begun to wane, although the following year the flame would flare up briefly again when he went off to join the British forces in Kuwait for the Gulf War. Shortly after he returned, the affair ended: he had fallen in love with another married woman “whose husband did not understand her.” Diana refused to speak ill of him and, to a large extent, blamed herself for the parting; their meetings had always been cloaked in secrecy, in the presence of her security staff, at her convenience not his, and their relationship had been a threat to his career. All this was true, but Diana had matured in the years of their affair. She no longer needed to prove to herself that she was a desirable woman. Rather, she had to prove that she was a worthwhile person.
The young woman who, when cautioned by Charles to mind her head as she went under a low archway and had replied, “Why? there’s nothing in it,” now found it packed with opinions and ideas on how she, as a member of the Royal Family, could make a difference to the lives of ordinary people.
Her visits to the sick, disabled and elderly became more frequent. When she was unable to sleep at night, she would alert the detective on duty and make a late-night unofficial visit to the wards of the seriously sick who no longer knew night from day. She wrote hundreds of letters to patients she had talked to at their bedsides. She went to see some when they were able to return to their homes. She always came with small, thoughtful presents—nail polish for a youngster who had commented on how pretty the colour on her nails was, a box of pastels for a talented boy who had shown her his drawings. Above all, she tried to make patients laugh. “Being a princess is not all it’s cracked up to be,” she confided to one awestruck, bedridden teenager. “The trouble is it’s so hard to have a pee.”
Despite advice to the contrary from the Palace, Diana centred her energy on Aids patients, addiction, abused and battered women. And always children. She retained her patronage of such organizations as the Royal Ballet, but she made it clear that there were more important things than dance: “People are dying on the streets,” she replied, when asked to give more time to her patronage of the company. Hostels for the homeless took her attention, and she spent hours, sometimes accompanied by Cardinal Basil Hume, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in England, talking to the destitute, listening intently to their stories, shedding tears when she was moved. She did not hesitate to put her arms round someone, whether they were suffering from Aids or living and sleeping rough.
“She seemed not to smell the decay and the dirt,” one hospital attendant noted. “She did not pull back or turn aside when faced with a horrific injury or the results of a ravaging disease. There was something noble about her in the truest sense. I just could not put it together with the image drawn of her in the press, the glamour that her life entailed, all those gala affairs and the clothes. My God—the health care that could have been bought with the cost of her wardrobe.”
Diana was torn by a great duality of purpose. She wanted to serve mankind and to represent the monarchy properly, and she was convinced that she could achieve both. Her life had taken a major turn: her bulimia was now infrequent, and this—and the knowledge that she could win a man’s love—had empowered her. The emotional rows with Charles had tempered but there were times when her depression returned and she made fairly hysterical, late-night calls to Highgrove.
Charles was not in an enviable position. His overwrought wife threatened his one sanctuary: his relationship with Camilla. His mistress, however, used this to her advantage. Camilla remained collected, no matter what the onslaught. If it was at all possible, Diana’s outbursts brought the lovers closer together. Sides had been taken: it was Charles and Camilla with Charles’s dedicated, well-trained militia of courtiers and camp followers, against a fearful Diana and her few close friends.
The boys were not unaware of the War of the Waleses, although Harry was now at Wetherby, a day school in London which William had previously attended, and since September 1990, William had been at Ludgrove, a boarding-school near Wokingham, Berkshire. Wills was viewed by his peers with a mixture of jealousy, resentment and discomfort His personal bodyguard came with him and he had to wear a device to alert his detective if anything was wrong. Diana had argued against this, but there had been no alternative.
Will’s first term at Ludgrove was traumatic. Before then, although he had often been separated from his parents for days and weeks at a time, he had been left in the care of the nursery staff who had spoiled him—to Charles’s displeasure. At Ludgrove, he was subjected to the same discipline as the other boys. Also, he was self-conscious and his classmates regarded him as untouchable. He was unhappy at the school and could not wait for the holidays. “I know how he feels,” Charles told a close staff member, when the family reunited at Highgrove for Christmas 1990. “I felt the same way as a child. It’s difficult for him.” But even more stressful for William and Harry was the drama being played out by their parents. With Hewitt gone from her life several months now a terrible loneliness took hold. She dissolved into floods of tears if Charles became confrontational, and equally if he ignored her. William had always been close to his mother, and seeing her cry upset him. “William had elected himself his mother’s protector,” a staff member says. “It was very touching to see them together. They were openly affectionate. Much hugging and kissing. The Princess was in a wretched state at about the time he went off to school. You couldn’t help but feel sorry for her, or for the Prince [of Wales]. It was a tough call. It must have been absolute hell for both of them. I’ve seen tears in Prince Charles’s eyes on more than one occasion. He is only human and he truly loves his children.”
One day, over Christmas, William found his mother crying on the stairs at Highgrove. He ran up to sit in front of her, put his hands on her shoulders and asked her what was wrong. Diana tried to compose herself but could not control her tears and told him she would explain when he was older. Suddenly Charles appeared. William was close to tears himself. He turned to his father and shouted, “I hate you, Papa! I hate you so much! Why do you make Mummy cry all the time?” Then, according to embarrassed staff who were witnessing this family crisis, the little boy ran down the stairs and into the garden, followed by Charles, then Diana shouting, “Now look what you’ve done, Charles!”
“[From that point] when they were at Highgrove together, Prince Charles spent the days in the garden and his evenings going over his papers, and the Princess remained mostly sequestered in her room or with the boys in the nursery. The night before William was to return to school, she called down to the kitchen to order their dinners to be sent up with hers on trays. When Prince Charles came down at seven he was shocked to hear this. He had planned for the family to dine together on this particular evening. He immediately rang the Princess, but was unable to reverse her orders and so he ate alone, also on a tray, in his study, but went upstairs to say goodnight to the boys later, before going out. The next morning, a Sunday, there was a repeat of this wilful attempt to keep the boys separated from their father. Breakfast was served to them and their mother on trays in her room. Lunch was ghastly. No one interacting really. The boys talked to their mother or to their father, but there was no real conversation between them. When William was leaving a short time later everyone trooped out to the car. He clung to both his parents and by the time he was seated and the car was ready to leave, he had lost control and was crying quite bitterly.
“Without the children,” the staff member said of Prince Charles, “he seemed to prefer to be anywhere but with her—and who could blame him?”
Her deep self-disgust, her terror that she might be injuring her children by her emotional behaviour, set off an alarm inside Diana. She knew she was drowning and dragging others down with her and that she had to fight her way to the surface, face her fears.
The spiritual side of her had been reawakened by consultations with the respected astrologer Penny Thornton, who with her husband, Simon Best, was a friend of the Duke and Duchess of York, whose marriage was also at breaking-point. Diana saw Thornton several times a week. The sessions pressed Diana into a process of self-empowerment.
One of her first positive acts was to confront Camilla face to face. Charles and Diana were at Highgrove during a school exeat when a party was being given for Camilla’s sister’s fortieth birthday. Charles had assumed that he would attend alone but at the last moment Diana insisted on joining him. He was uneasy all the way to the party and kept asking her to change her mind. She stood fast on her decision. She walked into the house ahead of him as Camilla loomed into view in the hallway. She looked shocked at seeing Diana, who held out her hand. Camilla took it haltingly, her glance moving instantly to Charles.
Most of the other guests were a decade or more older than Diana and at a loss as to what to make of the situation. Conversation was strained—Diana might have been from another planet. (They even seemed to be speaking a foreign language. Charles and his friends spoke an upper-crust English practised mainly by the Royal Family and their courtiers in which the letters er or re are substituted with a broad ah like pah for power, Empah for Empire; a w is inserted before th, like mawth for mouth. Diana, on the other hand, had never acquired “aristospeak.” Her speech had a distinct preppie touch to it, no drawl or emphasis on the vowels. The letter t at the end of a word was often completely swallowed, bringing in a reminder of Cockney. This is the way her Sloane Ranger friends spoke and she had found that it had a way of cutting through class differences.)
After dinner she was hustled upstairs to the sitting room with a group of other guests. Within moments she realized that neither Charles nor Camilla had come with them. An hour and a half later, she rose and headed for the staircase. Someone stopped her and suggested she had better not go. To everyone’s horror, she went downstairs. She found Charles, Camilla and another man in close conversation, which stopped when they saw her.
All three stood up.
“Boys,” Diana claimed she said, to her husband and his friend, “go upstairs. I am just going to have a quick word with Camilla.”
Camilla appeared surprised, but Charles withdrew and his friend followed. Diana asked Camilla to sit down and then, a surface calm belying her inward angst, she told Camilla that she was not an idiot and that she did not want to be treated like one. “I’m obviously in the way and it must be hell for both of you but I do know what is going on.” It was a bid to get things out in the open. “I just want you to know that I still love my husband despite his unfaithfulness with you.” Camilla, like the well-disciplined royal mistress she was, said nothing. Diana went upstairs where Charles was waiting and the two left almost immediately.
On the way home, Charles ranted and she cried, all the anger and pain of the past eight years spilling out in a wash of tears. As always they slept in separate rooms. The next morning she came down to have breakfast with him and told him what she had said to Camilla. It was obvious that he had spoken to Camilla after they had got home, but the confrontation had served its purpose. Diana, by facing the enemy, had regained her own strength. All along she had mistakenly believed that becoming Princess of Wales was the end-all. Now she realized that it had been just the beginning.
Her first priority was to her sons. She would see to it that they were not distanced from real life as their father had been. She wanted them to be as normal as possible despite their royal birth. Away from school, she dressed them in baseball caps and jeans, had picnics, went to funfairs, bought them the music that other youngsters of their age listened to. Also, she had taken her father’s advice and was working on her public persona. Her style had grown more mature, sophisticated, and she had learned how to use the media to her advantage. There had been hours of speech training, in which she learned to control her voice and be more relaxed before an audience or a television camera. She became an advocate for causes she deemed important, and in conversation with diplomats, politicians or intellectuals she held her own: 1990 and 1991 were the years of the true education of the Princess of Wales.
“I don’t know why there continues to be such interest in me,” she told one American reporter. “These are such important times,” and she pointed out that since her marriage there had been the Gulf War, East and West Germany had reunited, Soviet Communists had relinquished power, Nelson Mandela had been freed after twenty-seven years’ imprisonment and the South African government had repealed its apartheid laws. Margaret Thatcher had resigned and John Major was the new prime minister, deaths from Aids were terrifyingly high, and more and more homeless were sleeping rough on the streets.
Despite the difficulties in her marriage, she was looking better than ever and she was perceived as a woman of character. Then came the unexpected. In June 1991, William suffered a depressed fracture of the skull in a school accident when he and another boy were practising their golf swing. William had been standing too close to his friend, whose club had struck him in the head.
Diana was lunching with a friend at her favourite restaurant San Lorenzo, in Beauchamp Place, Knightsbridge, when her detective received a call on his cellphone informing him that William was on his way by ambulance to the Royal Berkshire Hospital. Charles had been at Highgrove and was already en route and the Queen had been informed. “The Princess turned dead white and raced from the restaurant in front of her detective,” a waiter recalled. “No one knew what had happened, of course. But it was clear that it was something serious.”
When Diana reached the hospital, Charles was already there and had agreed to William having a CAT scan. Both parents waited by his bed to hear the results. He was conscious and talking sensibly. The decision was that he needed surgery and that he would be transferred to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children in London. Diana rode with him in the ambulance while Charles followed in his Aston Martin sports car. They were met on arrival by the Queen’s physician, Dr. Anthony Dawson, and several other doctors, including the well-known neurosurgeon, Richard Hayward. The prognosis for William with surgery was extremely good, they were told. Still, they must understand that there was a risk, however small, that the surgery could damage the brain, or that the brain could have already been affected in the initial trauma.
The operation was scheduled within the hour. Diana remained by William’s bedside, holding his hand as he was prepared for surgery. At one point she asked where Charles had gone and was told that he had decided to attend a performance of Tosca at Covent Garden at which he was to host a large party of foreign environmentalists, several of whom had flown to London expressly for the occasion. The decision had been taken with the advice of his staff and the Palace, who did not want the public to think that William was in serious danger. Diana was aghast: she understood the royal viewpoint, but in her mind nothing was more important than for his father to be with William at this crucial time. It was the ultimate divergence between the royal mindset and that of the rest of the world.
Diana waited with a detective in a private room while William underwent brain surgery nearby. The operation was delicate, and Diana had been advised of all the problems that might arise during the procedure. After an agonizing wait of seventy-five minutes, Dr. Hayward, still in his operating-theatre clothes, came to tell her that her son had responded well and was being taken to intensive care, where she could join him. Charles was reached by cellphone. “Thank God,” he said, on hearing this news. But he did not return to the hospital after the opera. Instead he boarded the royal train for the overnight journey to North Yorkshire, where he was scheduled to speak early the next morning at an environment symposium.
Diana remained with William, holding his hand. There remained the danger of his blood pressure escalating, which might cause irreversible brain damage or death. At about 3 a.m. he opened his eyes, appeared to recognize her, then went back to sleep. The immediate crisis was now over. She asked the detective to call Charles then broke down in convulsive sobs of relief.
The morning papers headlined William’s narrow escape. Two tabloids hinted that the injury had been caused by a fall during an attack of epilepsy, from which he did not suffer. Diana was furious at this, but her greater wrath was directed towards Charles, who had continued with his visit to the Yorkshire Dales, ill-advised, it turned out, by the same pundits who had insisted he attend the opera the previous night. Bystanders, nearby, as he progressed on his mission, shouted their indignation in rude, bold terms. The banner on the front page of the Sun read, “WHAT KIND OF DAD ARE YOU?”
The next day he was at the hospital. Diana could barely acknowledge his presence. He accused her of blowing up William’s condition out of proportion and of allowing members of the press to see her looking distressed rather than registering controlled concern. Charles later claimed that the doctors had told him the operation was a routine procedure involving negligible risk, that there had been no need for both him and Diana to remain at the hospital, and that he had not left for North Yorkshire until he received word that the operation had been a success and William was sleeping peacefully with his mother still by his side.*
Diana was with William when he was released from the hospital to home care five days later. He had suffered no debilitating effects from either the accident or the operation, but such was not the case with his parents’ marriage, which was now virtually over. Still, the pressure remained for them to appear to be a closely bound family. To some degree Diana went along with this, but she was beginning to investigate means of bolstering her defence if Charles and the Palace decided to destroy her reputation in order to secure his.
Six months after William’s surgery, Charles insisted that the family go together to the Austrian ski resort of Lech. Diana was not easily convinced that William should be skiing. Finally the doctors convinced her that he was completely recovered and could now return to normalcy. A week before their scheduled departure Johnnie Spencer was taken ill with pneumonia and driven by ambulance from Althorp to the Humana Hospital in St John’s Wood, London. However, medical staff were more concerned about his heart Diana was at the hospital every day and was cheered to see how well her father was responding to treatment On 26 March 1992, just two days before she and her family were to leave on their skiing holiday, the doctors agreed that Lord Spencer could expect to return to Althorp on 30 March. Diana visited him on the twenty-seventh, a Friday. He was sitting up and complaining loudly about how bored he was and how anxious to be back at Althorp where the gardeners were busy with the spring planting.
The Waleses arrived on 28 March en famille at Lech, a charming mountain village in West Austria. The next afternoon, a Sunday, Diana had just returned from the slopes when she received word that her father had died after a heart-attack. She wanted to return to London immediately, but suggested that Charles remain in Lech with the boys. There was a heated discussion. Charles’s staff were fearful that if Diana returned alone the press would jump to the conclusion that there was a rift between them and that she “could not bear to be with her husband during such a crisis.” Diana relented. The boys remained in Lech with staff, but Charles flew back with her to London.
By the time they arrived, they were no longer speaking. A dour Charles and a grief-stricken Diana were photographed as they left the plane and got into the car for Kensington Palace. Lord Spencer’s body had been taken to Althorp for burial. On the morning of the private funeral service to be held in Great Brington, Diana left Kensington Palace by herself after another row with Charles. He had wanted to accompany her but Diana believed—rightly or wrongly—that his motive had been to counteract any press comments and had little to do with comforting her or respect for her father. She refused to be party to such a sham. Charles chartered a plane—she was driven from London to Northamptonshire—so that he could arrive at the service, if not with her then at least simultaneously.
*In his authorized biography The Prince of Wales, Jonathan Dimbleby spends three pages in defence of Prince Charles during this episode.
“The theme had become a refrain, the gist of which was that the Prince was a neglectful parent, indifferent to the well-being of his children … The lies about his feelings for his children were a source of persistent torment to him. Yet he thought it was impossible for him to allow the truth to be known [that Diana sometimes denied him access to the boys and that she revelled in the media seeing her hugging and kissing them while he found public display of this sort unroyal], which he believed would wreak even more havoc on his marriage and, in the process, open the institution into which he had been born to a form of ridicule that he feared might prove fatal.”