ONCE THE SEPARATION had been announced, a plot was hatched by the Palace to derail Diana’s popularity. At its centre was Jane’s husband, Sir Robert Fellowes. Diana was in danger of being trapped in a web of duplicitous, disloyal and destructive forces. The Palace was determined to enhance the Prince of Wales’s image. Diana was accused of denying Charles access to his children, of being “irrational, unreasonable and hysterical.” A story was leaked to the press stating that “Her behavior is endangering the future of her marriage, the country and the monarchy itself.”
Charles’s circle had shut her out Diana’s few friends in the press informed her that daily calls were being made to newspapers by the Prince’s Mends and staff accusing her of everything from megalomania to near madness. Diana rang Charles and “scathingly asked, ‘Why don’t you save yourself a phone call and ring the papers direct?’ ” Charles denied any knowledge of the source of such rumours, but Diana did not believe him.
All members of the Royal Family stood solidly behind Charles and closed the avenues of communication with Diana. The Queen even overcame her own moral indignation and invited both Camilla and Andrew Parker Bowles to the royal box at Ascot. Prince Philip wrote a vitriolic letter to Diana, then refused to acknowledge her when they met at William’s eleventh birthday party. The Queen and Prince Philip viewed Diana’s popularity as the cause of the monarchy’s problems.
Even Princess Margaret snubbed Diana. And, to rub salt into a raw wound, Lady Fermoy, age not mellowing her duplicitous character, visited Charles just three days after the separation was announced to extend her sympathy to him and to agonize with him over her granddaughter’s ingratitude. She did not see Diana. It was clear that her loyalties remained, as ever, with the Royal Family and not with her own.
Diana also knew that members of her staff were passing on information to “the other side,” and to the media. She began to include unscheduled stops in her day, not notifying staff until moments before her departure. By the time she reached her destination—her local Marks and Spencer food hall, her favourite boutique, or a friend’s house for lunch—squads of press would be waiting for her. She fired one chauffeur whom she suspected of selling information of her about-to-be visits, but the leaks continued. Diana knew she must work out a plan to gain more freedom.
At present, she was a patron of over a hundred charities and made more than two hundred appearances annually as a representative of the Royal Family. The venues were selected for her by the Palace, her words were closely monitored, and her actions restricted. Clearly she had to divest herself of this huge workload. On 3 December 1993, at a charity luncheon, she made the following announcement: “Over the next few months I will be seeking a more suitable way of combining a more meaningful public role with, hopefully, a more private life. I hope you can find it in your hearts to understand and give me the time and space that has been lacking in recent years … I could not stand here and make this sort of statement without acknowledging the heartfelt support I have been given by the public in general. Your kindness and affection have carried me through some of the most difficult periods, and always your love and care have eased the journey.”
Diana was acting as her own person, as she had since the publication of Morton’s book. She no longer trusted anyone’s advice, fearing the loss of her sons, or of her own life. She did not view either of these possibilities as paranoid delusion. Her high profile and the Prince’s acknowledged adultery had caused a steep dive in the popularity of the monarchy and in the public’s belief in Charles’s fitness for kingship. The history of the British monarchy was strewn with the bodies of wives who had been replaced in the affections of their royal husbands or who had displeased them.
However, Diana was more concerned with the possibility of losing her sons than her life. The memory was ever-present of her own mother’s lost battle to retain custody of her children and was a central reason in Diana not pressing for a divorce. She also knew that shortly after publication of the Morton book, Charles had agreed to full co-operation with Jonathan Dimbleby on both a biography and a lengthy television interview. Dimbleby was an insider in Charles’s court, and Diana now felt she had made a mistake in co-operating with Morton, for it appeared that she had given Charles the opportunity to have the last word.
Out of the myriad charities with which she had been affiliated before her announcement that she was devoting herself to a more private life, she retained active participation in five areas that were the most meaningful to her: Aids, leprosy, the homeless, the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, and the elderly. The Palace had never approved of her dedicated involvement with Aids and HIV patients. When her friend Adrian Ward Jackson, a governor of the Royal Ballet, had been in the last stages of Aids she had driven six hundred miles to be at his bedside and had kept vigil for three days and nights, leaving his room just long enough to catch a few hours’ sleep, then returning to hold his hand and tell him stories. When the end came, she remained at the hospice for several hours comforting family and Mends of other terminally ill patients. “God has taken our mother,” said one, “but put an angel in her place.” Diana’s long vigil and her appearance at Jackson’s funeral impelled Lord Wyatt of Weeford, a Mend of the Queen, to avow that the “Princess of Wales’s work for Aids patients elevates them to heroes to be copied by the young. It’s well known that Aids stems mainly from sodomy.” This unconscionable statement had been meant to discredit Diana but had the reverse effect: it was considered by some to be the view of the Palace. The liberal press made much of it Next a plethora of editorials broached the issue of there not being one person of colour among the Queen’s 300-plus personal staff. This was followed by articles questioning whether or not there would or should be a monarch at all once the Queen was no longer on the throne.
Diana became increasingly isolated from Charles and his world. She removed all trace of his presence from Kensington Palace, and her social life centred around a few close friends—Rosa Monckton, Kate Menzies, Carolyn Bartholomew, Elizabeth Tilberis and Lucia Flecha da Lima among them. Her butler, Paul Burrell, became her right hand—her “rock,” as she called him. She no longer spoke about anything personal on a telephone as she thought that Kensington Palace, her office at St. James’s Palace and her cars were bugged.
A terrifying game was being played, but Diana seemed to be making the most incisive moves. On 4 December 1993, The Times headline posed the question, “Did Diana Go or Was She Pushed?” The press and the public now considered her to have been the victim of a cold, unfaithful husband and a system too strong for her to fight. Three days later, the Archdeacon of York, speaking on BBC Radio 4’s popular Today programme, shocked listeners and the Palace by saying that the Prince of Wales was not fit to be king. “He has broken the vows [of marriage] and broken vows to God … How can he then go into Westminster Abbey and take the coronation vows?” This was followed by unfounded reports that the Queen had considered passing over Charles to declare William her heir. “The monarchy is self-evidently in crisis,” the Evening Standard proclaimed.
The Palace, with Nicholas Soames as spokesman, immediately countered: “Being heir to the throne is not an ambition but a duty and one which will befall him at a sad moment later in his life. [Prince Charles] will inherit the throne and that is the end of the matter.” But as far as the press and the public were concerned, that was not so. Diana had paved the way for doubts to be raised as to Charles’s suitability to be king. She was derided for having lied about her participation in the Morton book—yet, to the further fury and frustration of the Palace, her popularity continued to rise. Peaceful demonstrations had taken place outside Kensington Palace where banners were carried by the faithful stating, “Diana, we love you” and “God Bless the Princess.” But to Charles’s horror, they also carried banners with the words “Camilla the Godzilla.”
By now, Diana’s anger towards Camilla had abated. She discovered that it was both nonproductive and misplaced. She had been used and abused by her husband, not by Camilla. She filled her week with the life-and-death causes she felt her presence could most benefit, twice-weekly sessions with her psychotherapist, Susie Orbach, and with Dr. Mary Lovejoy who specialized in allergy and clinical ecology (Diana took vitamins and Prozac to counter her bulimia), lunches with friends, letter-writing, gym workouts, the occasional shopping trip, and in the evening a private dinner, a good book (P. D. James, Daphne du Maurier and Danielle Steele were her current favourites), magazines (Vanity Fair, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan and Hello!), television (EastEnders, Oprah Winfrey and old movies) or a video. She gave a casual dinner-party for six or eight friends every other Saturday night.
When the boys were on holiday she cancelled almost all social engagements and devoted as much time as she could to them, having their friends on sleepovers (“I want them to know that Kensington Palace is their home, not a public building,” she was fond of saying), going on excursions with them to amusement parks, museums, team games and shopping.
She was an early riser and had a daily early-morning meeting with her secretary, Patrick Jephson, her press liaison officer, the Australian Geoff Crawford, and Anne Beckwith-Smith, who was, however, no longer on her regular staff. This would be followed by a conference with her dresser if she was making a public appearance so that her clothes would be ready. She had dispensed with the services of an equerry, but she still had a bodyguard with her twenty-four hours a day.
The press became increasingly oppressive. A dramatic photo of her was worth tens of thousands. If a photographer snapped her with a man, the price escalated wildly. Misleading captions would top a picture of her slipping into her car with “a secret lover,” who was, in fact, her bodyguard. The man who ran the gym she went to, and whom she trusted, took unflattering pictures of her without her knowledge and sold them for £100,000. She could not walk from her car to a building without being mobbed by the press, who were determined not to allow her any form of private life. They stalked her from cars and motorcycles. They used long-range lenses to catch her sunbathing on a private terrace or beach, and jumped out from behind bushes and doorways to capture an image. Photographing Diana put money in their pockets, paid school fees, mortgages and placatory presents for their wives. Their constant presence so unnerved Diana that she would break down and shout at them to leave her alone. Whenever possible, she would place her handbag in front of her face—which earned her the nickname, within their circle, of “the bag lady.”
She had thought the separation from Charles might give her greater freedom, more privacy, but she was wrong. Instead she was stalked more intensely by the media. When she travelled abroad the foreign press dogged her on revved-up motorbikes, shouted at her, disguised themselves as waiters, clerks, even, on one occasion, as a dental assistant, to get a picture of her. Life outside Kensington Palace was harrowing. She remained the most photographed woman in the world, her popularity topping the Queen’s by 25 per cent.
Desperately Diana struggled to find a niche for herself. She remained happiest with her sons, and in her visits to the sick and dying. “Anywhere I see suffering is where I want to be, doing what I can,” she insisted. But her mature good looks were even more striking than her youthful beauty. Her smile dazzled, the startling blue eyes captured everyone’s attention. Magazines continued to clamour for pictures of her on their covers. Her face meant money, her message love: “The biggest disease this world suffers from is the disease of people feeling unloved. I know that I can give love, for a minute, for a day, for a week,” she maintained. The hounding paparazzi did not doubt this, but photographs of Diana holding the hand of a child with cancer or a black Aids patient did not command the same price as one that featured her with a suspected new suitor.
She was still searching for a formal role and wondered if she could become a roving “ambassador,” a job she was sure she could do well, especially after all her experience on royal tours. She appealed to the Queen to create such a job for her, but the Palace refused.
In October 1994, Diana was crushed when the tell-all book Princess in Love, by Anna Pasternak with James Hewitt’s full co-operation, appeared. In it Hewitt revealed details of their love affair that Diana had believed belonged only to them. Besides its tawdriness, it was a terrible betrayal, and sent Diana into an emotional spin. Pasternak claimed that “Princess in Love was born out of a desire that the truth should be told in the most sympathetic terms to everyone involved.” However, at the time of its publication, Diana’s affair with Hewitt was over and had not been public knowledge. Now that she had separated from Charles, it could only harm her in negotiations with him and the Palace and perhaps give him cause to seek full custody of the boys.
Suspicions began to fester in Diana that the Palace might have had something to do with Hewitt’s impassioned confession. She saw herself as the potential victim of a plot to destroy her credibility, which might sound like paranoia but there was enough evidence, however circumstantial, to convince close associates that she was in danger and to propel her into action.
Her power rested with the public. They were her army and, although some in her camp attempted to dissuade her, she was determined to rally them behind her by once again using the media, television this time. But before she could set the plan in motion Charles’s long-awaited BBC interview with Jonathan Dimbleby was aired on 29 June 1994, to commemorate his twenty-five years as Prince of Wales. Meant to re-establish Charles as an industrious, caring man focused on his work with the Prince’s Trust, the Prince’s Youth Business Trust, the Prince of Wales’s Institute of Architecture, his work for the Duchy of Cornwall and his position as chairman of the Royal Collection Trust to make the Royal Art Collection (which is larger than the combined collections of the Tate Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Gallery) more accessible to the public. The programme stuck to this script until Dimbleby asked suddenly: “Did you try to be faithful and honourable to your wife when you took on the vow of marriage?”
“Yes, absolutely,” Charles replied.
“And were you?”
“Yes,” Charles said, then added, “until it became irretrievably broken down, us both having tried.”
What followed was not part of the text approved by the Palace, who had tried, along with the Queen and Prince Philip, to persuade Charles to abandon the interview and failed. Dimbleby asked him about his relationship with Mrs. Camilla Parker Bowles. Charles admitted to having committed adultery with her, that she had been “the mainstay” of his life for many years, and would continue to be a part of his life in the future. He admitted to three separate periods during which she had been his mistress: before her marriage in 1973; after the birth of her children and before his marriage to Diana (1979–81); and since 1986. The following day, Dimbleby released a statement claiming that the Prince of Wales had told him off-camera that the marriage had broken down immediately upon his resumption in 1986 of his relationship with Mrs. Parker Bowles.
Charles had believed that truth would be his best defence. Instead, it shifted sympathy into Diana’s court, infuriated his parents, the Palace, Andrew Parker Bowles and Camilla’s parents, and made the “mainstay” of his life a focus of mass loathing.
Dimbleby’s biography, written with his subject’s full approval, was published the following October. It proved the long and intimate relationship between Charles and his mistress, relating intimate details only Charles could have supplied, and it painted Diana as an obsessed, neurotic woman. Just reading the index under her name reveals the position of the text: “volatile behavior … jealousy of Camilla Parker Bowles … alleged suicide attempts … photographed in a bikini while pregnant … resentment of the Prince’s interests … attempts to control the Prince’s life … self-absorption … outshines the Prince in public … persuades the Prince to drop some of his friends …” It was made clear by Dimbleby that Charles had never loved Diana, that she was nothing more than “a hired womb,” and that her behaviour was “hysterical, obsessive and prone to violent mood swings.”
But Charles’s criticism of his parents, his admission of adultery with Camilla over so many years, his harsh treatment of Diana and her emotional and physical problems served him poorly. The Queen and Prince Philip were angry, Andrew Parker Bowles sued for divorce, the public and the press flew to Diana’s defence, and Diana seized the moment to make her next move.
Shortly after publication of Dimbleby’s biography, Diana entered into secret negotiations with two of the producers of the country’s most popular news documentary programme, Panorama. There were many months of clandestine meetings at Kensington Palace to work out a programme format, and everyone involved was aware that if the Palace knew what they were planning, the project would either be axed or severely censured. Royal interviews were always subject to Palace approval.
At 11 A.M. on 5 November 1995, a Sunday, a camera crew and television reporter Martin Bashir entered the service wing of Diana’s Kensington Palace apartment, opened for them by one of Diana’s most trusted staff members. The others, except her bodyguard, had been dismissed for the day.
Bashir and his crew made their way to Diana’s first-floor study, where she was waiting for them. Her initial appearance jarred them. She was already made up to appear before the cameras. Her eyes were rimmed with black, giving her a haunted, gaunt look. She wore a conservative dark suit and a tailored white blouse which completed the sombre impression she made. It was an entirely different Diana from the woman known for her vibrant use of colour. Bashir is a low-key personality, an interviewer who never competes for attention with his subject, and it was no accident that Diana chose him. The programme would have an aura of dignified discussion. She had approved the questions, and it had been agreed that Bashir would not digress from these. If he did, she would not reply.
Diana sat in a straight-backed chair looking somewhat isolated from her surroundings. In response to Bashir’s straightforward yet probing questions she related, in a controlled, modulated voice, her struggle with bulimia, the shattering realization that her marriage was a sham, her awareness of Camilla Parker Bowles’s affair with her husband, her depression, and her own affair with James Hewitt, “Yes, I adored him, yes, I was in love with him.” She added that his betrayal had “devastated” her. But a reference to Parker Bowles defined her appearance was when she said, “There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.” She confessed concern about the Prince of Wales’s fitness to be king, but affirmed her belief in the monarchy and her hopes for Prince William. She finished by saying that she would “like to be a queen in people’s hearts. … Someone’s got to go out there and love people and show it.”
The interview was shot during five tedious hours in which Diana took many breaks so that she could prepare her answer to Bashir’s next question. During all that time she never lost control or said anything she had not thought through carefully. She appeared greatly sincere, intelligent and mature. Her hurt and disappointment were over-shadowed by her love for her sons, and those who suffered more than she. Her demeanour, coupled with her dramatic appearance, made a stunning visual impact.
She waited until Tuesday, 14 November, Charles’s forty-seventh birthday, which was less than a week before the programme was to be broadcast, to call her brother-in-law Robert Fellowes to inform him that she had done the interview. Fellowes was in a state of shock. “Does Her Majesty know of this?” he asked. Diana replied that she did not Had the Prince of Wales been informed? No. He panicked. He informed her that he had to tell the Queen immediately and that he must speak to Diana after that. Fellowes was in a tight spot: Diana had “pulled one off.” For any member of the Royal Family to give a personal interview and for the BBC to sanction it without Palace approval or knowledge was unheard of. The Prince of Wales was on a five-day official tour to Germany, and when Fellowes tried to contact Diana later that day, he was told she had gone to Broadmoor, a top-security jail for the criminally insane. He could not contact her. Diana avoided him for the entire week, and the BBC did not bend under pressure from the Palace.
Diana’s bravura performance attracted the largest television audience to date for any interview-format programme, and was an unqualified success in terms of public relations and as a counter to the Palace’s campaign to discredit her. But it had two immediate repercussions. Diana had planned that she would increase her public service workload again and was to appear at a large event for the Red Cross. Notification that this had been cancelled by the Palace reached her within a few days of Panorama. Three weeks later she was summoned to an audience with the Queen and Charles.
They met on a rainy Wednesday afternoon, 28 February 1996, the date Diana referred to as the saddest in her life. It was a private meeting, held in the Queen’s study. Prince Philip was not present. The Queen sat behind her large eighteenth-century desk, the top neatly organized, with pictures of her grandchildren displayed in silver frames. She beckoned Diana and Charles to sit down in two facing chairs. Her expression was serious. Diana confessed later that she had felt like a schoolgirl before the headmistress for some peccadillo.
Elizabeth was now an aging woman approaching her seventh decade. She looked curiously démodé, her hairstyle popular with elderly women in her mother’s day, her expensive ensemble matronly. Where once she had sparkled with youth and given the country a renewed sense of vitality after the grim tenure of the Second World War, she now seemed older than her years, a woman who had never developed the joie de vivre her youth had promised, nor her mother’s lovable façade. The blue eyes had remained bright, but now there was more ice than fire in them. Charles had always cowered somewhat in her presence and left it in a disorienting mood. He seemed to Diana equally uneasy as the Queen requested that they file for divorce as soon as possible. This was an amazing order coming from a monarch who had always shunned divorce within the Royal Family to the extend that she had refused to allow her sister Margaret to marry the man she truly loved because he was divorced. The wrecked marriages of her three older children, along with Princess Margaret’s to Lord Snowdon, seemed a revenge of biblical proportion.
The audience lasted forty-five minutes, and by the end Diana had agreed with Charles to a divorce. She determined that she would try to make their sons’ lives as normal as possible under these terrible, disruptive circumstances. She was conscious of the hurt they must already be suffering from the public airing of their parents’ problems. This was the last thing Diana had wanted, and the thing she most regretted. She returned to Kensington Palace that afternoon, inconsolable. She spent the evening alone, but was on the telephone to her closest friends until early in the morning. By noon she had issued a statement that “The Princess of Wales has agreed to Prince Charles’s request for a divorce. The Princess will continue to be involved in all decisions relating to the children, and will remain at Kensington Palace, with offices at St James’s Palace. The Princess of Wales will retain the title and be known as Diana, Princess of Wales.”
To have made such a statement without the Queen’s knowledge was, by royal standards, shocking and insolent. Diana appeared to have acted without advice and in fact she was on her own: Patrick Jephson, her private secretary, had left her employ some weeks earlier. Diana’s ill-conceived reasoning seemed to have been that pre-empting the Palace would increase her bargaining powers.
The Queen met this presumption with icy disdain, immediately issuing a public rebuke countermanding Diana’s statement and adding that “The Princess’s future role and her title remained to be addressed.”
Diana was well aware that the war between herself and the Windsors had been stepped up and that she had to be expertly prepared for any mines that would be laid in her path. She hired as her lawyer Anthony Julius of the firm Mishcon de Reya. Julius was known as a bulldog in his negotiations, and not likely to be intimidated by the Palace. But it would be the Queen, rather than Charles, Diana or their representatives, who would make the final decision as to Diana’s position after divorce. The sticking point was going to be her title.
Diana believed, as the mother of a future king, that the honorific HRH was her due. The Queen was adamant (especially after Diana’s unauthorized public statement) that she would lose it. It was a royal put-down, forged of resentment, and it was not the first time that a Windsor monarch as a means of retaliation had denied the title, which negated any royal privilege she now possessed. King George VI had been obdurate in refusing his brother, the ex-King Edward VIII, the right for his wife to be known as Her Royal Highness, an edict that Edward fought unsuccessfully for many years.
“They might think I’m a fool,” Diana was quoted as saying, “but I know their game. It’s as plain as a pikestaff. Well, if they want me out of the way that much, they might have to pay for it.”
Through Julius she demanded a lump payment (the original figure was somewhere in the neighbourhood of £50 million). Charles wanted to give her approximately £1 million a year, to come from the Duchy of Cornwall, his private estate. He would have to turn to the Queen for any substantial sum, which he did not want The matter of Diana maintaining her office in St James’s was an especially contentious point St James’s was now Charles’s London home, and he did not want Diana to intrude upon his privacy there.
Negotiations dragged on for four months. Finally it was agreed that Diana would receive a lump sum of £17 million, advanced by the Queen, and that Charles would be responsible for the children’s education, holidays, clothes and medical needs. Custody was to be shared equally between Charles and Diana. She would no longer be styled Her Royal Highness, and would henceforth be known as Diana, Princess of Wales. Prince Philip had fought hard for her to be demoted to Duchess of Cornwall, but the Queen’s lawyers were certain that public reaction would prove devastating to the Royal Family and that Diana would only raise her financial demands.
Diana was permitted to remain in her Kensington Palace apartment, where she and the two princes would be under the efficiently managed security of the Royal Protection Squad. The IRA had renewed their bombing campaign and there was well-grounded fear that members of the Royal Family were targeted. For this reason, Palace lawyers argued successfully, Diana would not be given a home in the country which would create additional security problems. To Prince Charles’s chagrin, she was granted the continuing use of her offices in St James’s Palace and £400,000 yearly for her expenses. Finally a clause was put into the deed of settlement that Diana must agree never “to write, speak or communicate any further information concerning the monarchy, the House of Windsor, Prince Charles, her marriage or her divorce settlement.”
Diana signed the document. She had been stripped of her HRH and formally expelled from the Royal Family. “I don’t care what you’re called,” William told Diana. “You’re Mummy.” On 15 July the couple were granted a decree nisi. Six weeks later, on 28 August 1996, fifteen years after “the marriage of the century,” the divorce became absolute. Diana was free at last—or was she?