Diana

His mother, then Princess Elizabeth, was only twenty-two when he was born, and had been married to the former Prince Philip of Greece, now Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, for just a year. In 1952, when he was three and a half years old, his grandfather, King George VI, died and his young mother became Queen of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Defender of the Faith and Head of the Commonwealth. As Queen she had the weight of her duties to cope with – in the year of her Coronation, for instance, when Charles was four, she and the Duke of Edinburgh undertook a six-month tour of the Commonwealth. In the circumstances Charles saw far less of his parents than did other children of his age. When he did see them – and both made a great deal of effort to make his life as ‘normal’ as possible, playing with him and trying to be there when he had his evening bath and supper – there was still no escaping the fact that his mother was the Queen, Head of State, Head of the Armed Forces and Governor of the Established Church, the apex of a large royal household dedicated to serving her every wish. She saw her duty first and foremost as her ‘job’, following her father’s footsteps as sovereign, with all the hard work and dedication which that entailed. As Queen, she was inevitably surrounded by an aura, blocking all real intimacy: Prince Charles has remained in awe of her all his life.

He was (and still is) equally in awe of his father, Prince Philip, who, despite a difficult childhood, had emerged as a success in every field he tackled, at school, in the navy and as consort to the Queen. Extremely handsome and formidably strong-willed, the Duke of Edinburgh dominated the family: it was he who decreed the course of Charles’s education which largely followed the steps he himself had taken. A preparatory day school in London, Hill House in Knightsbridge, where the shy boy came into contact with unknown children of his own age for the first time, was followed by a preparatory boarding school, Cheam in Surrey. Charles was nine years old when he was sat down in front of the television by his headmaster to watch himself declared Prince of Wales (the hereditary title of the heir to the throne) to a cheering crowd of thousands of Welshmen. It came as an unexplained shock and only served to increase the difficulty of maintaining the illusion that he was ‘just another schoolboy’. He was desperately homesick and made no friends at Cheam.

Cheam was followed by a far more harrowing experience – Gordonstoun, the tough educational establishment on the northeast coast of Scotland which his father had attended, and which had been founded by the German educationalist Kurt Hahn, on the model of his original establishment in Germany. Gordonstoun was intended to produce self-reliant leaders in the mode of Charles’s father, who had excelled at everything sporting and became Captain of Cricket. Charles, shy and vulnerable, was bullied all the more because he was ‘different’ and royal; boys lined up for the distinction of roughing up the heir to the throne at rugby. Most kept their distance from him for fear of being labelled as toadies: some went in for active physical bullying, shoving his head down the lavatory or beating him with pillows. The physical discomfort was extreme: snow drove in horizontal from the North Sea through the open windows of the unheated wooden dormitories. There were obligatory cold showers, runs and stormy sessions in open sailing boats on the North Sea. Again, he made no friends; his parents rarely visited, often sending the Dean of Windsor, the Right Rev. Robin Woods, in their stead. His only glimpse of home comforts was staying with his beloved maternal grandmother, Queen Elizabeth, at her Scottish home, Birkhall, on the royal Balmoral estate, which he ever after referred to as ‘the most wonderful place in the world’. His refuge was music, to which he was introduced by his grandmother, and the stage, always a home for people who are not totally sure of their own identity.

At home in London his refuge was his nanny, Mabel Anderson. ‘Mabel saved my life,’ he used to say. Mabel was his guardian angel, ever present in his young life. When he contracted infectious diseases such as chicken pox, he would be sent away to preserve the Queen’s health, accompanied by Mabel, often to Holkham, the Leicesters’ stately home on the Norfolk coast not far from Sandringham. And home life, much as he cherished it in comparison with his school experiences, could be tough and demanding. His parents believed that being the heir to the throne involved rigorous training. His sister, Anne, outgoing, determined and tomboyish, was always much closer in character to his father, who was often dismayed by Charles’s ‘wimpishness’ and made no secret of it. He could be a bully and often was to Charles, embarrassing him and putting him down in front of other people. His mother, although loving him, was non-confrontational and left the overseeing of his education largely to his father.

With his future involvement with the Commonwealth in mind, Charles was given a year off from Gordonstoun to attend Timbertop; this he liked because of its location in the Australian bush and its connection with nature, which he both enjoyed and revered. Gordonstoun had been followed by university, Trinity College, Cambridge, under the wise guidance of Rab Butler, a distinguished former Conservative minister, and by a brief and uncomfortable period at the Welsh university Aberystwyth, designed to familiarize him with the distant country which was his ‘principality’. Charles dutifully learned Welsh and showed courage in facing up to the hostility of the Welsh nationalists who threatened to disrupt his formal installation as Prince of Wales in 1969.

Under the guidance of his father and his great-uncle, Earl Mountbatten, he was launched on a series of military training courses, piloting aircraft, parachute jumping, and Dartmouth Royal Naval School, culminating in a five-year spell in the navy. As a result of these macho heroics, the newspapers dubbed him ‘Action Man’. Charles drove himself hard physically in a bid to show his father he was not the wimp he thought he was. He rode hard to hounds and at polo, pushing himself to the limit although his horsemanship was not of the highest standard. He faced physical danger as if it were a challenge to be overcome, but at heart he was not as tough as he appeared. On one occasion when he telephoned his mother to express his distress at the death of one of his sailors, the Queen was heard to remark, ‘Charles really must toughen up’. He remained shy, sensitive and insecure, a good, kind person who became increasingly spoiled by the indulgence of those around him. He was loved and cosseted by his mother’s household, notably Lady Susan Hussey, one of the Queen’s Women of the Bedchamber and only eleven years his senior. His grandmother, the Queen Mother, adored him, as did his aunt, the vivacious and intelligent Princess Margaret. Once he was given his own household, he was spoiled by his entourage, principally by his valets, a tradition which was to continue. This cosseting and ministering to his every need had, by the time he left the navy in 1976, had its effect on his character. He began to resent the relentless demands of ‘duty’, of having his every day planned, of being told what to do by senior courtiers.

Squadron Leader David Checketts, who had been Charles’s mentor and adviser since 1966 when he had accompanied the young prince to Timbertop, was the first victim of Charles’s determination to assert his independence. Checketts, an urbane, grammar school-educated public relations man with a distinguished RAF record, had been, as Charles’s biographer Anthony Holden put it, ‘a pillar in the young Prince’s uncertain public life, rarely more than six feet away, always ready to help him through difficulties and defuse awkward situations. Through the end of his schooldays, his time at Cambridge, his investiture and his Service career, Prince Charles owed Checketts a huge debt for the smooth progress of his day-to-day administrative needs and the grand strategy of his emergence into public life.’² Checketts had acted as a brake on the Prince’s more headstrong impulses and public statements and had expressed occasional disapproval of his private life. Prince Charles had become increasingly unwilling to accept criticism whether direct or implied, or, indeed, opposition to his ideas. To Checketts’s despair Prince Charles now seemed bent on pleasing only himself. He had developed a passion for blood sports, shooting and particularly hunting, despite warnings from the Palace that the popular tide was running against them. In summer he ardently pursued another ‘elitist’ sport, polo, encouraged by his father, who had been an enthusiastic player until injury forced him to retire. In 1979, now aged fifty, Checketts had resigned his post as Charles’s private secretary. His departure was much regretted by Michael Colborne, a former naval petty officer who had served with the Prince on HMS Norfolk and whose appointment in 1974 as the Prince’s personal secretary had been arranged under Mountbatten’s unparalleled influence. A grammar school boy like David Checketts, Colborne’s appeal to Charles had been his directness, his willingness to say what he thought. ‘He desperately needed somebody who could sit in his office and speak common sense to him, and say no. We had these wonderful ten years together of lots of arguments, but he asked me not to change so I thought I’ll show him the greatest respect but if I don’t agree, I’m going to say so.’³

Unable to find a suitable challenge for his ill-focused energy, the Prince had more time on his hands than he either wished or cared to admit. To his friends he seemed troubled by anxiety and discontent, which he sometimes allowed to affect his behaviour towards his staff. Easily provoked by minor irritations, he became uncharacteristically impatient and peremptory. Whereas a decade earlier his comments about the official programmes put before him had been innocent and dutiful, by the late seventies his response to yet another ‘Away Day’ could seem reluctant and jaundiced.⁴

Charles had inherited the capacity to blow up into sudden fierce fits of temper which his grandfather George VI had displayed to an alarming extent and which were known in the family as his ‘gnashes’. ‘For no apparent reason,’ Dimbleby wrote, ‘the Prince would suddenly give way to an alarming display of uncontrolled anger, his face suffused with intense emotion.’ Invariably the anger was disproportionate to its cause, usually some minor mistake or annoyance, and vented on his closest aides, Checketts and Colborne.

Hitherto, in the absence of a strong relationship with his parents, his great mentor had been his father’s uncle, Earl Mountbatten, who was in effect a surrogate father to him. Charles used to call Mountbatten ‘Grandpapa’ and address him as ‘honorary grandfather’: Mountbatten responded by referring to Charles as his ‘honorary grandson’. By the time Charles was twenty-three Mountbatten had become his closest confidant and the greatest single influence on his life.

Mountbatten, who had had first-hand experience of the Abdication Crisis of 1936 when Edward VIII, Charles’s great-uncle, had chosen to abdicate the throne in order to marry the American divorcee Wallis Simpson, had lately begun to worry about the Prince’s wilfulness and lack of direction, comparing him with his great-uncle Edward VIII, always known in the family as David. Observing the Prince’s thoughtless, often selfish and inconsiderate behaviour, Mountbatten sternly warned him: ‘I thought you were beginning on the downward slope which wrecked your Uncle David’s life and led to his disgraceful Abdication and his futile life ever after.’⁵ Mountbatten criticized a sudden change of plan by Charles which would have entailed the cancellation of a US Coastguard crew’s Easter vacation: ‘. . . how unkind and thoughtless – so typical of how your uncle David started,’ Mountbatten wrote. ‘. . . I spent the night worrying whether you would continue on your uncle David’s sad course or take a pull.’⁶

Ironically, it was Mountbatten who pointed Charles down the road which led to Camilla and eventually to Diana. ‘I believe in a case like yours,’ Mountbatten wrote, ‘that a man should sow his wild oats before settling down. But for a wife he should choose a suitable and sweet-charactered girl before she meets anyone else she might fall for.’ Significantly, he added, ‘I think it is disturbing for women to have experiences if they have to remain on a pedestal after marriage.’⁷ Unfortunately for his recipe for a successful dynastic marriage, Charles had already met and fallen in love with a girl who did not quite fit the bill. He had met his ‘ideal woman’ seven years earlier when he was twenty-three: Camilla Shand, introduced to him by his university girlfriend Lucia Santa Cruz. Camilla, a pretty, witty, confident blonde, was the perfect answer to a vulnerable young man like Prince Charles, still very young and unsophisticated for his age. ‘Camilla has great sexual power,’ a friend affirmed. A courtier related to the family intimated that Camilla was sexually aware quite early: ‘she was quite a little goer at fifteen and well organized by her mother’.⁸ She was warm and uncomplicated and, importantly, shared his love of the countryside, dogs, horses and hunting. Ironically, the closest link between Camilla and Charles was a sexual one even before they began an affair. Camilla’s great-grandmother on her mother’s side was the notorious Alice Keppel, wife of Colonel the Hon. George Keppel and mistress of Charles’s great-great-grandfather, King Edward VII. Camilla was fascinated by her powerful great-grandmother’s career and the thought of emulating her must have been in the forefront of her mind when she famously remarked to him, ‘My great-grandmother was your great-great-grandfather’s mistress . . .’

Camilla was fifteen months older than Charles but he had always liked the company of older women, with whom he felt more at ease than he did with young girls. He was emotionally lonely and lacking in self-confidence. Camilla’s parents were well-connected county people but far from being a part of the high aristocracy. Camilla’s mother, the Hon. Rosalind Cubitt, was Mrs Keppel’s granddaughter; her mother, Sonia, had married into the Cubitt family, descendants of the Cubitt builders of Belgravia who had been ennobled with the title Barons Ashcombe. Her father, war hero Major Bruce Shand, became Master of the local hunt, the Cottesmore. Both, and Camilla’s mother in particular, were socially ambitious, with a wide circle of upper-class friends in Sussex and London. Camilla and her brother Mark and sister Annabel were brought up in a close-knit family. Confident, good-looking and exceptionally attractive, the three children were destined for social success. Camilla rode to hounds with bravery and skill: she had had a conventional education with the emphasis on social graces rather than intellectual achievement: undistinguished school, finishing school abroad, Queen’s secretarial college – almost a prerequisite for debutantes – followed by the Season. Like many girls of her background, her main aim in life was the getting, pleasing and keeping of a man, and in this she was certainly following in her great-grandmother’s footsteps. ‘I think she sees herself as her great-grandmother, Mrs Keppel,’ one of the Queen Mother’s ladies-in-waiting told the author in 1993.

Charles and Camilla first met in the summer of 1970, on the polo ground, Smith’s Lawn, in Windsor Great Park, where most of his romances began. Their rapport was instantaneous. The romance was encouraged by Mountbatten who saw Camilla as ideal mistress material who could pave the way for his granddaughter, Amanda Knatchbull, who was still in her early teens, to take over as the virgin bride. The couple spent weekends together at Mountbatten’s country house, Broadlands. After a while, the sharp-eyed Mountbatten became aware that Charles was becoming very attached to Camilla and warned him not to get too fond of a girl, who, for all her attractions, he saw as insufficiently aristocratic and insufficiently virginal to be acceptable as a royal bride. There seemed no future in the relationship and, moreover, Camilla was in love with Andrew Parker Bowles with whom she had been having an on and off affair since 1967. Parker Bowles, a handsome Guards officer, was notoriously attractive to women and repeatedly unfaithful to Camilla, who, however, had never given up on him. She was fond of Charles but in love with Parker Bowles. Andrew himself was having an affair with Princess Anne: unkind friends suggested that getting her own back on Andrew by bedding the Princess’s brother was a factor in Camilla’s relationship with Charles. An older friend of Camilla’s remembers an evening at Annabel’s, the nightclub which was at the centre of London society: ‘I can remember the triangle when Andrew Parker Bowles was there. Princess Anne was in love with Parker Bowles, Camilla was in love with Andrew, Charles was in love with Camilla, Camilla was having some of it but she was also potty about Andrew – and all this intrigue was going on. They were younger than me so I remember watching it all, the whole thing. It was just bad luck. And then off Charles goes to sea and I think Camilla wouldn’t have been quite as sad as he was because she was mad about Andrew. But even if she hadn’t been, would she have been allowed to marry Charles?’⁹

The answer was undoubtedly no. Camilla’s affairs were known in society and at court. The Parker Bowles family moved in royal circles: Andrew’s father Derek, charming, witty and a good gossip, was a close friend of the Queen Mother. His mother, Dame Ann, was the daughter of the rich Sir Humphrey de Trafford, twice steward of the Jockey Club, whose wife was a member of the equally rich and aristocratic Cadogan family. Everybody liked Camilla, whom a friend described as having ‘laughing eyes . . . warm and full of fun’, but she was not considered in those days aristocratic enough for the Prince of Wales and her reputation would certainly have prevented any thought of marriage.

Charles was powerfully attracted to Camilla but three weeks before Christmas 1972 he was posted to the frigate HMS Minerva and later left for the Caribbean. It has been suggested by one of Mountbatten’s close circle that he arranged for Charles to be posted overseas to get him away from Camilla and to pave the way for a possible engagement to his own granddaughter, Amanda Knatchbull. ¹⁰ Before Charles left he invited Camilla and Mountbatten to tour the ship. She returned the following weekend. Afterwards he wrote sadly to Mountbatten that it was ‘the last time I shall see her for eight months’. But if Charles was not ready for marriage, Camilla and Andrew Parker Bowles were. Parker Bowles’s romance with Princess Anne ended when she fell for Captain Mark Phillips. On 15 March 1973 he and Camilla were engaged and married in a huge society wedding in July. Camilla had got her man.

After Camilla, Prince Charles played the field. According to his valet, Stephen Barry, who had worked for him since 1970 and knew all the intimate details of his life, Charles’s recipe for the perfect woman was that she should be tall, blonde, curvaceous and with an English rose complexion. His first serious involvement was in fact with Mountbatten’s granddaughter, Amanda Knatchbull (a brunette), on and off over a period from 1974 to 1979. Mountbatten actively promoted the match: Charles proposed; Amanda, unwilling to step on to the royal treadmill and well aware of what it entailed, refused him.

During this period Charles dated a number of beautiful upper-class and not so upper-class girls. ‘All his romances seemed to start at polo matches,’ Stephen Barry wrote.¹¹ Among them were Lady Jane Wellesley, daughter of the Duke of Wellington, a family friend rather than a romance; Georgiana Russell, who got fed up with standing in cold Scottish rivers and married someone else; and Sabrina Guinness. Two of them were important to him: Davina Sheffield and Anna Wallace. Davina, a delightful, tall blonde, was rather in the Diana mode but, Barry said, ‘more grown up’. They had seemed set for marriage, she had received the royal seal of approval, being invited to lunch with the Queen at Windsor, and cheerfully passed the Balmoral test, when a former boyfriend ungallantly revealed in the press that he and Davina had lived together. Rumours of an engagement died down after that. Charles could not afford to marry anyone who could create any kind of scandal. The Royal Family had been keen for him to marry the lovely and artistic Lady Leonora Grosvenor, sister of Sarah Spencer’s former boyfriend, Gerald, but in 1975 she married the Queen’s cousin, Patrick, Earl of Lichfield, instead.

Charles met Anna Wallace, another tall, beautiful blonde, described by Barry as ‘a marvellous-looking girl with a sparkling personality and presence’ on the hunting field. Like Davina Sheffield, she had had the honour of lunching with the Queen, a sure sign that the relationship was taken seriously. She ended their friendship after quarrelling publicly with the Prince at a Windsor ball in honour of the Queen Mother’s eightieth birthday and again at a polo ball at Stowell Park, the home of Lord and Lady Vestey. The cause this time was the Prince’s ignoring Anna to spend the entire evening with Camilla Parker Bowles. Anna, who was well aware of the importance of Camilla in Charles’s life, walked out on him and shortly afterwards married the Hon. John Fermor-Hesketh. There were others less serious: the actress Susan George, US admiral’s daughter Laura-Jo Watkins, and, of course, Sarah Spencer.

The ‘World’s Most Eligible Bachelor’ had become the ‘Playboy Prince’. As Sarah Spencer had said, Charles was a romantic and fell in love easily, but in fact his sexual libido was low, he was frightened of and shy with young women and unable to make a commitment. Like most weak men he was capable of behaving worse than if he had been sure of his own mind. These qualities and the fact that most of the women he pursued, like Amanda Knatchbull, Lady Jane Wellesley and Anna Wallace, who moved in the same circles as he did, were only too aware of the stultifying nature of royal life and were repelled by it, made the finding of a bride difficult. Moreover, Charles himself in the mid-seventies was happy as a bachelor: he enjoyed the freedom of being able to do as he pleased and kept his girls at a distance. He made the dates when it suited him, never collected the girls beforehand. They were expected to arrange their own transport unless they were special friends. He never gave them presents and only rarely sent flowers. It was made quite clear that he controlled the relationship so that things could not get out of hand. Only three women were truly important in Charles’s life: his mother, the Queen, his grandmother, ‘Grannie’, and his nanny, Mabel Anderson.

He was only really at ease with confident married women older than himself: two of them in particular, the boisterous Australian Dale Harper, later Lady Tryon, nicknamed ‘Kanga’, and, supremely, Camilla Parker Bowles. A friend remembers how she first met Dale at a weekend house party at Lord Tryon’s house: ‘There was this Australian girl, rather vulgar, great fun, to whom Anthony Tryon had lent his Volvo estate to drive down and she had crashed it – not fatally – so she was in a great state of semihysterics . . . “That’s all right,” said Anthony. “That’s all right.” So Dale came along and absolutely exploded on the scene and Anthony was a friend of Prince Charles so of course Dale immediately got onto Prince Charles and would often tell stories of what she had taught Prince Charles. Can you believe that? On the Queen’s Flight flying to Australia. She would report what she had taught him. Mind boggling . . .’¹²

At the Cirencester Polo Ball in the summer of 1980 the physical passion of Charles for Camilla was obvious to everyone. ‘Charles spent the whole evening with Camilla,’ Jane Ward, a former girlfriend of the Prince, recalled. ‘Charles and the Parker Bowleses shared the same table, and Charles spent the whole evening dancing with Camilla. They were kissing passionately as they danced – on and on they went, kissing each other, French kissing, dance after dance.’¹³ Andrew Parker Bowles apparently could not have cared less. He had, as a friend put it, ‘other fish to fry’, and the fact that his wife was having a passionate sexual affair with the heir to the throne flattered him rather than otherwise.

Royal reporter James Whitaker remembers how, when Prince Charles was going through a period of two years’ enthusiasm for cross-country events in 1975 – 6, ‘virtually always there were Camilla and Dale Tryon and so was Stephen Barry. He would bring the boots out of the car and he would carry all HRH’s clobber and gear . . . and helped him dress, and the two other girls fussed around and made sure he had a drink and made sure the organizers knew where he was, made sure people got out of his way when he went to the starting lines . . .’¹⁴ Barry, who as Charles’s valet since 1970 had acted as his virtual wife, had in return been outrageously indulged. ‘He dressed beautifully, his shirts and ties were all from Turnbull & Asser, he was a very amusing, outrageous homosexual who was so extrovert he was absurd, and he got more and more confident as it went on.’ ‘He was exotic and extravagant and behaved disgracefully. He would give parties at Ascot where he would roll about the lawn fighting with other gays and serving Dom Perignon champagne.’¹⁵ A lady-in-waiting to the Queen remembered Barry: ‘He modelled himself on Prince Charles and looked just like him . . . And at some intellectual party I went to, I happened to meet somebody who had found out who I worked for and said, “I wonder if you know Stephen Barry?” And I said, “Yes, of course I know him. I walk down the corridor with him every day.” “Oh, he’s a great friend of mine. He’s shown me all the pictures at Clarence House [then the London home of the Queen Mother] and he’s very interested in the Arts.” So next morning I walked down the corridor with him [Barry] and I said, “I met a friend of yours last night. He said he did enjoy seeing the pictures at Clarence House.” And Stephen went bright purple.’ When she reported this to a senior courtier, he advised her, ‘Be careful. The Queen Mother’s probably given him permission to do so.’ According to a lady-in-waiting, Barry gave ‘very noisy parties’ with ‘loud music’ in the room beneath the one she used at the Palace. ‘But Prince Charles liked him,’ she added. ‘He always stood up to him and didn’t make too many mistakes.’¹⁶ According to Whitaker, Barry was on friendly terms with Camilla but when Diana, whom he perceived as a threat to his position, arrived, he left.

Charles had apparently resumed his sexual relationship with Camilla in 1979 but as she was married it was considered – in those days – unthinkable that the relationship should be legitimized. The Parker Bowleses – at least from Andrew’s point of view – had an open marriage. He did not feel obliged to give up his pursuit of women despite the fact that he was now married and the father of two children. He condoned his wife’s relationship with Charles and the two men were friends but, in military circles, the heir to the throne’s relationship with the wife of a brother officer was considered to break the rules, so much so that the Queen’s former private secretary felt bound to inform the Queen of their disquiet. ‘Ma’am,’ he said, ‘the Prince of Wales is having an affair with the wife of a brother officer and the Regiment don’t like it.’ She looked down and said nothing, determined to continue her policy of non-intervention in her children’s lives.

Camilla’s role in the Prince’s life was more than purely physical; she was also his intimate adviser, usurping Mountbatten’s role as his mentor. The Prince had ceased to pay as much attention to his ‘honorary grandfather’ as he had in his younger days. He found other mentors – he was ‘an intellectual pillow’, his father said scornfully, while a courtier commented, ‘Prince Charles goes through gurus like other people do socks’. In his search for self-fulfilment and the meaning of life he had come under the influence of Laurens van der Post, a protagonist of Jungian ideas. In 1977 he and van der Post had spent five days in the Aberdare Mountains of Kenya, exploring the natural world around them in long walks, followed by evenings of intense discussion of the ‘inner world’. He then formed a deep emotional and spiritual relationship with a young Indian woman who had sent him a book called The Path of the Masters, a guide to the spiritual wisdom of the Eastern gurus. When her influence manifested itself in vegetarianism and above all opposition to the killing of animals which led him to cancel his shooting, his new private secretary, Edward Adeane, became alarmed. ‘It’s got to be stopped,’ he declared. In the event, this enthusiasm was as short lived as many preceding ones, although his interest in non-Christian faiths remained.

Then, in August 1979, Mountbatten was blown up in his fishing boat by the IRA off the coast of Sligo. Charles was devastated. He had been dreading the moment when Mountbatten might die: now that it had come so suddenly and violently he was desolate. ‘I have lost someone infinitely special in my life,’ he wrote. ‘. . . In some extraordinary way he combined grandfather, great-uncle, father, brother and friend . . . Life will never be the same now that he has gone . . .’¹⁷ As Charles realized, no one could replace Mountbatten in his role of friend and counsellor, and above all his willingness to tell him things he didn’t want to hear. Charles accepted criticism from Mountbatten that he would never have taken from anyone else. Mountbatten’s death occurred at a critical moment in Charles’s life when, dissatisfied with himself and with the course his life was taking, he was seriously contemplating marriage. ‘I must say I am becoming rather worried by all this talk about being self-centred and getting worse every year. I’m told that marriage is the only cure for me – and maybe it is!’ he had written to a friend on 15 April 1979.¹⁸

The trouble with Charles was that he did not want to marry. He had everything he needed without a wife (including Camilla). ‘He was a loner, he liked silence,’ said one of his staff. ‘And later when he found he had a wife to talk to and to consider, it threw him.’ Charles had led an entirely self-centred life: when he went away for a weekend he did not have to lift a finger: ‘Stephen would be ready with the Range Rover, loaded up with everything he needed, his painting brushes . . . everything.’ The shock at the loss of his beloved mentor, and the memory of Mountbatten’s strictures, were no doubt a crucial influence on Charles’s increasing conviction that he must do his duty and take a wife. Camilla’s influence on his life even increased with the loss of Mountbatten. She was to play a dominant role in Charles’s choice.