TWENTY-FOUR HOURS AFTER the funeral, Diana was still at Althorp and Raine had returned to the town-house she and Johnnie had bought in Farm Street, in Mayfair, London. Charles Spencer—now the 9th Earl Spencer with an inherited fortune worth approximately £89 million, and owner of the estate, its land and treasures—called together Raine’s staff. “We were told that her ladyship could take only what belonged to her and not one thing more,” a senior member of staff recalled. All portraits and photographs of his stepmother were to be removed immediately, as were Barbara Cartland’s books, which were presently being sold along with signed postcards in the gift shop.
A short while later, Sue Ingram, Raine’s personal assistant and hairdresser, arrived to collect some of her clothes. Charles told her she was no longer on the Althorp payroll, then he refused to allow her to touch or remove anything. Diana intervened and eventually Charles agreed that Ingram could collect Raine’s personal belongings from her wardrobe but that she would have to be supervised and the contents of the cases examined before they left the premises. After all these years, he was getting his revenge on his stepmother for selling the treasures he felt should have been left at Althorp. He did not trust Raine, or her staff and they were all given immediate notice.
The following day Raine presented herself unannounced at the locked blue gates of Althorp. The gate-keeper allowed her Land-Rover to pass. An unpleasant scene ensued, in which Charles barred her entry to the house. This was unreasonable behaviour towards the woman who had been devoted to his father for years, and had made him happy. Raine had brought with her a book of red stickers and wanted to place them on items that she believed were hers and wished to have moved to London. She could not help but notice that her portrait had already been taken down and replaced with one of the 3rd Earl, Charles Spencer, Duke of Sunderland, who in 1700 had married Anne Churchill, daughter of the Duke of Marlborough and his wife, the fiery Sarah, Queen Anne’s close friend, thus merging two great families. Charles would have done well to do a bit of research on his ancestor, for he was known to be “bad-mannered, rude to everyone [including Queen Anne]” and was “touchy, assertive, one of the most unpopular of men, his own worst enemy.”
Neither Diana nor Victoria, the new Countess Spencer, could influence Charles in his attitude towards Raine, which embarrassed both women. Trailing Raine through the house, the new Earl Spencer allowed her to sticker only her portraits and personal memorabilia. Raine left, head high, outraged but in control. The following day her maid, Pauline Shaw, appeared. She had come, she said, to collect the rest of her ladyship’s clothes. Charles was not there and she was allowed upstairs. About two hours later she rang for help.
Lined up in the doorway of Raine’s former sitting room were four large Louis Vuitton suitcases, which she wanted staff to take to the car. Charles reappeared with Diana, who noted that the cases bore her father’s initials, not Raine’s. Charles insisted that the cases were opened and the contents searched. If they were Raine’s possessions, they were to be transferred to boxes or bins. In the end, large, black plastic dustbin bags were used. The cases were thoroughly searched, found to be justifiably Raine’s property and stuffed into their ugly containers like last week’s newspapers. One staff member recalled that Charles kicked “the bags down the stairs … I think it made him feel better.”
In contrast to his brother-in-law’s brutish behaviour, Prince Charles wrote Raine a warm letter of condolence. Diana struggled with her mixed emotions, her grief at the loss of her father, her desire to honour him in death, which should have meant respect for his widow, her own antipathy towards Raine, and her wish not to create a schism within the close circle of her siblings. Within three days of their father’s death, Charles had ordered an inventory to be taken of the contents of Althorp to ascertain what had been sold since his father’s marriage to Raine. The final accounting filled him with even greater venom towards his stepmother. It was what he would call “the rape of Althorp’s treasures”: paintings, furniture, silver, gold, rare books, archives, manuscripts and drawings, china and porcelain, land and cottages had been sold, worth millions of pounds, which appeared not to have been reinvested in the upkeep of the estate. Of course, at this time, Charles had no idea of what it actually cost to maintain Althorp.*
Immediately he learned of his father’s death Charles had closed the house and the gift shop. Three weeks later he reopened them to paying visitors, and raised the entry fee by 20 per cent “The atmosphere at Althorp was not what it had been with the former Earl Spencer,” an employee recalled. “The new Countess Spencer was a scared rabbit of a young woman. She never seemed happy there, or in her husband’s presence. And his lordship was an arrogant, inconsiderate man. After her father’s death, the Princess of Wales seldom came to Althorp. She had not been there too often when he was alive, but her visits, especially with the young princes, had been happy occasions.”
A memorial service for Johnnie Spencer, organized by his son, was held on 19 May 1992, at St. Margaret’s Church, Westminster. Charles had made sure that the Spencer family, Frances, and Raine’s family, including a subdued Barbara Cartland in black, were kept separate, entering from different sides of the church and seated with a centre aisle between them. Diana sat with Prince Charles, William and Harry in the front pew with the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, the Queen Mother, the Duke and Duchess of York, Prince Edward, Princess Anne and Princess Margaret. Johnnie Spencer would have been pleased at such a royal send-off. Raine was photographed, controlled and smiling, as she left the service. She was not going to let the Spencers or the Royal Family see her crumble under what she considered her ill-treatment.
With her father’s death even the façade of Diana’s marriage disintegrated. She knew she was now in a vulnerable position. In August 1992, the famous “Squidgy tape” of telephone conversations between Diana and James Gilbey was published in the Sun. It had been recorded, Diana was certain, by Palace detectives and leaked to the newspaper to make her look like a wayward wife, and place her in the same category as the Duchess of York, who had recently separated from Prince Andrew after photographs had been published of her with her then lover nibbling her toes by a swimming-pool in the South of France.
The possessor of the thirty-minute tape had held it for three years, waiting for the moment when it would prove most valuable. This appeared to be the time: not only was the public fully aware that something was very wrong within the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales, they were opening their eyes to his intimate friendship with Camilla Parker Bowles. But another reason was given by Diana’s close friends for the timing of the release of the Squidgy tape. “There was sufficient evidence that still another tape existed,” one of Diana’s staff has said, “not one between the Princess and Gilbey, but a shocking taped conversation between Prince Charles and Mrs. Parker Bowles. This one was made by an outside party, however, and the Palace only had knowledge of it, but had not heard or been able to acquire it The chances were that it would surface sooner or later. Therefore the rush to leak the Gilbey tape, which would point the finger first at the Princess of Wales having engaged in adultery and thus mitigating to some degree the Prince’s unfaithfulness.”
In fact, the Squidgy tape, which the Sun edited, cutting out any direct reference to sexual contact between them, does not make clear that Diana and Gilbey had been to bed together and it is couched in tiptoeing language. Diana refers to the House of Windsor as “that fucking family” as she complains about their cold treatment of her “after all I’ve done.” Later, Gilbey admitted that they had an affair, but the sexual references in the tape are neither blatant nor explicit. And Diana ends the conversation by telling Gilbey about a recent visit she had made to Sandringham, when she had wandered off with her detective to see Park House, now converted into a home for the disabled.
DIANA: There was something really strange. I was leaning over the fence yesterday, looking into Park House, and I thought: Oh, what shall I do? And I thought, Well, my friend [Gilbey] would say go in and do it. I thought, No,’cos I’m a bit shy, and there were hundreds of people in there. So, I thought, Bugger that. So I went round to the front door and walked straight in … It was just so exciting.”
GILBEY: How long were you there for?
DIANA: An hour and a half … And they were so sweet. They wanted their photographs taken with me and they kept hugging me. They were very ill, some of them. Some no legs and all sorts of things.
Diana’s relationship with Gilbey was never as deep as the one she had had with James Hewitt. But the pattern was much the same. These were men who she could talk to about her feelings for the bruised and sick, her need for love and compassion, the poor treatment she received at the hands of her in-laws and how empty her marriage had been for years. There was a driving desperation in her need to communicate and to have a man express warmth towards her.
The publication of the Squidgy tape humiliated Diana, and frightened her. She sensed that only one shoe had dropped and feared when the next one would follow. She realized that she had to get her side of the story to the public. “She felt,” a friend said, “the lid was closing down on her. Unlike other women, she did not have the freedom to leave with her children.” Her greatest terror was that Charles and the Palace would discredit her, claim she was an unfit mother, remove her sons from her care, and prove that their father was the injured party. Having seen the same warped justice applied against her mother, she had every reason to be concerned.
She set in motion her counter-attack. What followed was a plot as secretive and suspenseful as the best John le Carré spy story. She could not give a revealing interview to the press, neither could she write a book telling her side of the marriage. But she could find a willing, sympathetic, respected and talented author, gather together her few trustworthy friends and communicate through them to the writer.
In July 1991, Andrew Morton, a journalist who had published several informative royal books,* wrote a series of articles for the Sunday Times that coincided with her thirtieth birthday. It was known that he was currently working on a biography of Diana, as were several other writers. But Morton had more credibility, a higher profile and, most important, had been sympathetic to her in his writings. He was contacted surreptitiously by one of Diana’s intermediaries who proposed that, if total secrecy was observed, the Princess of Wales might be willing to co-operate with him in his present project. Morton agreed at once. It was a decision that entirely altered both their lives.
At no time during the interviewing process, which took place at Kensington Palace over the next six months, did Morton come into personal contact with Diana. He composed questionnaires, which were delivered to her at her home. Morton, who had the code-name Noah, began with questions about her childhood, then the wedding, and the years since she had become Princess of Wales. Diana sat in her private sitting room with the door locked, answering the questions by “speaking into a rather ancient taperecorder.” When Morton played back these tapes, he was amazed at Diana’s candour, rush of words and her confessions of attempted suicide.
Could she have been twisting or embellishing the truth to her benefit? “No. At no time did I or anyone involved in the project ever feel manipulated,” Morton insists. “Far from it. What we all [the go-betweens and the editorial staff of the publisher Michael O’Mara Books] felt we were trying to do was give Diana a voice, for the truth to be told and to give her the chance to make a life for herself on her own terms. Was she manipulative? Yes, she was, but in a rather guileless way. The whole point about manipulation of the media is that it should not be seen to be done, rather like marionettes. [Later] Diana, unlike Charles, the Queen or, for that matter, Hillary Clinton, was found out, talking to journalists in their cars or phoning editors direct. Her manipulation, such as it was, was more a demonstration of her own poor sense of self and begs the question, Why should the world’s most famous woman worry about her public image? Answer: Her constant insecurity.”
However, there was more at stake for Diana now than her ego. She made it clear to her confidants that she feared for her life and for her ability to retain custody of her sons if Charles and she were to separate, which she now believed inevitable. Confessing to her attempts on her own life was taking a tremendous risk, for such an acknowledgment might backfire. But there was no other way to show how desperate she had been, how far Charles had driven her to the edge, how blatantly and cruelly he had deceived her, and that their marriage was a sham. She had been the sacrificial lamb to his image and his duty, the perfect cover for his affair with his mistress. During the course of her co-operation with Morton, she proved the validity of her claims by making available to him passionate letters and postcards written by Camilla.*
In 1995, she told interviewer Martin Bashir, in her appearance on Panorama, “I was at the end of my tether. I was desperate. I think I was so fed up with being seen as someone who was a basket case because I am a very strong person and I know what that causes in the system that I live in.”
While Diana was surreptitiously feeding Morton the gritty truth of her marriage, she cunningly set the stage. In February 1992, with the book about to be delivered to the publisher, she set off with Charles on a tour of India, no longer the enchanted land of the British Raj, which Queen Mary, Prince Charles’s great-grandmother, had visited as Princess of Wales at about the same age. Diana was not blind to the mystery and adventure of this exotic country, but she was aware too of the great poverty and suffering within it. Like Queen Mary, she had read several relevant books before her departure, learning what she could of the Hindu, Muslim and Buddhist religions, as well as words of greeting in several dialects. Unlike Queen Mary, she was immediately approachable.
When Charles was photographed playing polo, or addressing business groups, Diana took advantage of solo photo sessions. The most lasting image of the tour is of her sitting alone on a bench before the magnificent Taj Mahal, built by the Moghul emperor Shah Jehan as a tribute to his great love for his favourite wife, the beautiful Mumtaz Mahal, who died in 1632. There is Diana, the intense brightness of the Indian sun lighting her hair like a halo, the garden tomb in the distance, the four shimmering water channels behind her that echo the four rivers of Islamic paradise as blue as her eyes. This poignant image made its way around the world, and the contrast between a princess deceived by love and one who gained love eternal, aroused great sympathy. Its irony was not lost on the public.
She was photographed alone again in Calcutta with the Sisters of Mercy; Mother Teresa was not there as she was ill in Rome. Diana ladled out bowls of food for the hungry, placed her bare hands on the heads and faces of lepers, and sat on the beds of the incurably sick. Four days after her return to London, she flew to Rome, where she was photographed leaning humbly over the diminutive nun, who told her, “To heal other people you have to suffer yourself.”
“My life is torture,” Diana confessed.
Mother Teresa grasped her hand. Diana smiled shyly, tears visible in the corners of her eyes. Click went the cameras. Pious nun and bruised supplicant prayed together. Diana looked almost transfixed. “I’m not saying it was all a sham,” a photographer says, “but Diana knew the advantage of such images. I was told that she herself chose the place and time for the photo sessions. She was not being led by anyone. She was her own woman and she knew exactly what she was doing. These photos appeared before there was any knowledge of Morton’s book, which she was co-operating on at that very time. Her public-relations instincts were brilliant.”
This was the year, 1992, that the Queen called her annus horribilis. After a two-and-a-half-year separation Princess Anne and her husband, Captain Mark Phillips, had divorced (they had been living separate lives with new partners for a number of years);* the Yorks had parted after the front-page stories of her infidelity (his own indiscretions were never revealed in the press), and a story appeared in the Daily Mail in March, written by Andrew Morton and supposedly leaked by Diana, that the Prince and Princess of Wales were separating. In a matter of months the Queen had been assailed with the disturbing news that all three of her married children were on the verge of divorce, and in each case adultery was a factor. Then came the notorious publication of Morton’s book, followed by a costly and destructive fire at Windsor Castle. In December, just a few days before the Princess Royal was to marry her lover of five years, Commander Timothy Laurence, RN, the text of the revealing, and often lurid, three-year-old taped conversation between Charles and Camilla (forever after to be known as Camillagate) was published in a London tabloid.
Morton’s book was published on 16 June 1992. Diana distanced herself from it, claiming that she had not co-operated. Morton was under hostile fire. “The animosity, scepticism, and sheer vitriol,” he wrote, in the foreword of his revised edition five years later, “with which the Establishment and their media acolytes first greeted the publication of my book graphically demonstrated the difficulties of presenting the truth to the British public.” But the barrage of criticism he attracted was a small price to pay for the instant fame and tremendous financial rewards he gained from its publication. For Diana, her calculated risk had turned out to be a hand grenade locked in her grasp with the pin out. However vehement her denials, Charles and the Palace were certain of her co-operation, for there were too many things in the text that only she could have known. Doors were closed to her; telephone calls were not returned. Courtiers did not want to be found guilty by association. Charles no longer made a pretence of sharing their home in Kensington Palace. The publication of the book had accomplished two things, however: the public now knew how callously she had been betrayed by Charles, and he would be forced to end the pretence that was their marriage. But Diana worried that she had placed herself in even greater danger.
It has been said that Diana knew about her husband’s taped conversation with Camilla and was an instigator in the leak to the press because she wanted to force Charles into a public declaration of his infidelity. Certainly, the publication of the tape corroborated the facts in Morton’s book, instantly transformed her into the injured party and propelled Charles to acknowledge publicly that they were no longer living as man and wife. But, to the threat of all she held dear, there was every sign that events now forced Charles and Camilla into an adversarial conspiracy.
Despite her condemnation of “that woman,” as she referred to her son’s adulterous mistress, the Queen held Diana responsible for her husband’s unfaithfulness, blaming it on the eating disorder and her emotional instability. However, public sympathy turned to Diana, for no wife in the late twentieth century could be expected to remain with a man who said the lurid things that Charles, in those pilfered tapes, had professed to his married mistress:
CHARLES: I want to feel my way along you, all over you …
CAMILLA: Oh, that’s just what I need at the moment.
CHARLES: Is it?
CAMILLA: I know it would revive me. I can’t bear a Sunday night without you.
CHARLES: Oh, God.
CAMILLA: It’s like that programme Start the Week. I can’t start the week without you.
CHARLES: I fill your tank!
CAMILLA: Yes, you do!
CHARLES: What about me? The trouble is I need you several times a week.
CAMILLA: Mmmm. So do I. I need you all the week, all the time.
CHARLES: Oh, God, I’ll just live inside your trousers or something. It would be much easier!
CAMILLA: [Laughing.] What are you going to turn into? A pair of knickers? [They both laugh.] Oh, you’re going to come back as a pair of knickers.
CHARLES: Oh, God forbid, a Tampax, just my luck! [Laughs.]
CAMILLA: You are a complete idiot! [Laughs.] Oh, what a wonderful idea!
CHARLES: My luck to be chucked down the lavatory and go on and on forever swirling round on the top, never going down!
CAMILLA: Oh, darling!
CHARLES: Until the next one comes through.
CAMILLA: Or perhaps you could just come back as a box.
CHARLES: What sort of box?
CAMILLA: A box of Tampax, so you could just keep going.
CHARLES: That’s true.
Later in the tape the lovers attempt to work out a rendezvous at the home of a mutual Mend, away from her “rampaging kids” and at a time when her husband will be in London. This is the most damaging segment of the conversation, for Charles proves that he places love over duty to his country. When the lovers were hoping that Camilla’s husband’s business would detain him in London, the nation was caught in a crippling ambulance strike that had lasted six months, cost more than £35 million, and had created life-and-death situations while the police and the Army tried to take the place of true medical assistance. Andrew Parker Bowles was on duty in London helping with the crisis. On the tape Charles seems almost exultant that the emergency will keep him away. “Just our luck,” he moans, at the suggestion by Camilla that the strike might end sooner than expected.
The international press went wild with the release of the tapes. Charles came under severe criticism and Camilla, who received threats to her life, was too terrified to step out of her house. She had become the most loathed woman in Great Britain and possibly the world. She had turned a fairytale into a story of lust and deception. Sympathy was all with Diana, now being viewed as “Diana the Good” and “Diana, the Abused and Sinned Against.” The fairytale marriage was over.
Prime Minister John Major addressed the packed House of Commons in December to say that “With regret the Prince and Princess of Wales have decided to separate,” and that “The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, though saddened, understand and sympathize with the difficulties that have led to this decision.”
Despite the evidence on the tapes of adultery by the Prince of Wales, the announcement was met with staggering political and public disappointment. The popularity of the Queen and Prince Charles dropped almost overnight, while Diana’s ratings in the polls were on a meteoric rise, for Morton’s book had been validated.
Diana spent Christmas 1992 alone. William and Harry were with Charles and his family at Sandringham. Her victory had been Pyrrhic, for she still feared the possibility of losing her beloved sons. The most recent events had caused her much pain. Despite her control of her bulimia she was losing weight and could not sleep. Great black circles appeared beneath her eyes. She looked haunted. She thought it might help if she could spend some time in the country with the boys, but Charles now had Highgrove. She called her brother and asked if she could have the Garden House, a four-bedroomed cottage at Althorp that was currently vacant along with a small house nearby where her armed bodyguards could be housed so that she and the boys would have some real privacy together. He agreed and Diana made plans to have her future “cosy nest” decorated to suit her needs.
She had already picked out fabrics with Dudley Poplak when in mid-April Charlie called to tell her that he had had to reverse his decision. The problem, he asserted, was security, hers and his nephews’. An intrusive police and surveillance presence would be required as Althorp was open to the public on certain days and it would be costly to close it.
Diana took her brother’s refusal as a stinging rejection. The boy she had mothered and protected when she had been no more than a girl had left her to struggle on her own. She was deeply hurt and the incident caused a breach between them. However, it had one positive effect Diana now shared with the stepmother she had so disliked a sisterhood based on rejection, for Charlie had been cruel to Raine, too. In May Diana contacted her and the two women had lunch together. They would never become fast friends, but at long last the bitterness had gone.
Diana was at a crossroads in her life. She hated who she was, but wasn’t sure who she wanted to be. She wanted to put her fame and her ability to capture the attention of others to some good. Her meeting with Mother Teresa had had a powerful impact on her because she had seen how one person could make a difference in the world. She was sure her Spencer genes would not fail her, so she pulled herself together and prepared to fight for her freedom, the well-being of her sons, and a purpose.
*Raine, Countess Spencer, had received a fortune in jewels from her husband during their seventeen-year marriage. She was left an estimated £4 million, as well as her husband’s cash and investments and an annuity of £10,000, their two houses in Bognor Regis and the contents, and the house in London with all its contents. Diana, Sarah and Jane were left only a memento each to be chosen by Johnnie’s trustees, and each of his grandchildren £1,000. However, trust funds had been made for his daughters at an earlier time, although the amounts are unknown.
*At that time, Andrew Morton’s credits included Inside Kensington Palace, Duchess, The Wealth of the Windsors, Diana’s Diary and Inside Buckingham Palace.
*Morton was not allowed by British libel and copyright laws to use these letters in his text In fact, in the original book (there was to be a second book, and a new edition with added material to the first book), he never comes out and says that the Prince of Wales and Mrs. Parker Bowles were lovers, but refers to them as having a “secret friendship.”
*“In a way, the Phillipses” marriage is sadder than the Waleses’,” a Highgrove friend of both couples said in 1989. “The Phillipses are friendly to each other, but emotionally indifferent, whereas at least the Waleses still quarrel spectacularly. He can still make her rush upstairs in tears; the nitrogen is very much there. On the other hand they have nothing in common, and the Phillipses do have the great shared interest of the horse world.”