Diana

Diana was a lovely young girl, ‘high-spirited and larky and fun’ as a royal relation put it; ‘she had a lot of good in her, a lot of natural good that was not a pose.’ It was, above all, her extraordinary powers of empathy, her ability, as she later put it, ‘to smell out suffering’, which attracted the Prince. Her empathy with him over Mountbatten’s death and his own deep sadness and need for consolation touched the Prince deeply. Charles, it would seem, was strangely interested in this young girl who had actually had the self-possession to turn him down. He invited her to join him on the royal yacht Britannia, for the annual Cowes week sailing holiday. This time he did not expect her just to turn up on her own but, significantly, asked his assistant private secretary, Oliver Everett, to look after her: ‘. . . he [Charles] had lots of older friends there and I was fairly intimidated but they were all over me like a bad rash. I felt very strange about the whole thing, obviously someone was talking,’ Diana later recalled.²

That ‘someone’ was Charles himself. According to his official biographer, he ‘surprised one of his closest confidantes [unnamed] . . . by intimating to her that he had met the girl he intended to marry’. The ‘confidante’ had responded that if that was the case he should keep quiet about it. Charles, however, went on to praise Diana’s open and easy manner . . . her warmth . . . her enthusiasm for rural life, and her background through which she knew a little of his family and certainly enough, he presumed, to have few fears of marrying into it.³ As an insider, Charles seems to have had little conception of what marrying into the Royal Family would actually mean, and was never properly to understand the pressures Diana underwent when she did enter the royal circle.

On Britannia, however, the open and easy manner which Diana had acquired from her parents when talking to strangers made her instantly popular with the crew who, according to Barry, ‘fell in love with her to a man’. The royal servants liked her and the general impression was ‘Isn’t Lady Di lovely?’ and that she might well be in line for ‘the job’. Yet, whatever Charles may have confessed to his confidante, he was careful not to show anything in public. ‘The Prince himself didn’t seem to take too much notice of her at the beginning, but her eyes followed him everywhere,’ Barry recorded.⁴

Unaware as yet of Camilla Parker Bowles’s role in her destiny, Diana was invited to stay at Balmoral in September while her sister Jane and brother-in-law Robert Fellowes were there. ‘I stayed back at the Castle because of all the press interest,’ Diana remembered, ‘. . . Mr and Mrs Parker Bowles were there at all my visits. I was the youngest there by a long way. Charles used to ring me up and say “Would you like to come for a walk, come for a barbecue?” so I said: “Yes, please.” I thought all this was wonderful.’⁵ Charles’s old friends warmed to her as she was so obviously happy and he seemed so attracted to her. Patty Palmer-Tomkinson, married to Hampshire farmer Charles Palmer-Tomkinson, and one of Charles’s closest friends, remembered how enchanted she had been with Diana: ‘We went stalking together, we got hot, we got tired, she fell into a bog, she got covered in mud, laughed her head off, got puce in the face, hair glued to her forehead because it was pouring with rain . . . she was a sort of wonderful English schoolgirl who was game for anything, naturally young but sweet and clearly determined and enthusiastic about him, very much wanted him.’⁶

One of the Queen Mother’s guests at Birkhall remembered an occasion when the house party from Balmoral came over for drinks. Nicholas Soames, a friend of the Prince’s since childhood who also acted as his equerry, and Camilla Parker Bowles, were among them, with Diana. ‘I was somewhat surprised to see Diana in purple stockings seated on the floor in front of Queen Elizabeth – Camilla Parker Bowles was obviously there to vet this poor girl who had no idea what she was letting herself in for,’ the guest commented.⁷

Diana was invited up to Scotland again in October, this time to Birkhall itself, one of Charles’s favourite places from his school days. While Charles went out stalking, Diana remained at the house, doing her needlepoint. The fact that the Queen Mother had herself invited Diana to stay was significant; she was clearly in favour of Diana as a possible bride for her beloved grandson. Some authorities have it that Ruth Fermoy pressed Diana’s claims on Queen Elizabeth. Others close to Queen Elizabeth deny that she played a leading role: ‘Ruth wasn’t against it,’ said a courtier; ‘to tell the truth she was rather for it, and no doubt had said something to Queen Elizabeth. [But] I think Queen Elizabeth came from a different angle and that is that Cynthia Spencer, Diana’s grandmother, had been a great friend and the Spencer family were “friends of the royal family”.’ ‘It was so surprising,’ she went on, describing Diana’s Birkhall visit: ‘She [Diana] was very simple, rosy cheeks [like] a schoolgirl. And charming. Totally sort of innocent ... They were all delighted. Before she came up, one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting had rung me up and said, “Do take care about this one, I think it’s serious.” And there was no doubt that the Queen Mother was anxious about it, she checked the bedroom and all that sort of thing which she wouldn’t normally have done for a nineteen-year-old girl. So one sort of knew that it was being planned or being hoped for . . .’ After Diana and Charles had left, she recalled, ‘Ruth was at the airport on her way to go into waiting and she came running towards me and said, “How did the visit go? Was she all right? Was it all right?” ’⁸

In pushing the claims of Diana, Ruth Fermoy was at the very least guilty of a cynical act. She of all people would have known of the Camilla situation and she of all people would have known what she was getting Diana into. Undoubtedly she must have found the temptation of being the grandmother of the future Queen too much to resist, despite knowing her granddaughter’s character and, equally, being aware of the nature of the court. During the engagement, when a friend said to her how wonderful it was that the bride loved music, she did volunteer enigmatically ‘She’ll need that’, but the closest she ever came to warning Diana of what lay ahead was to tell her that she would find the Royal Family’s sense of humour very different from her own. In the end she collaborated with the Spencer family – and indeed Diana’s own feelings – in pushing her into the marriage.

In true courtier fashion, Ruth Fermoy was swiftly to change her tune when the marriage began to reveal its fault lines. Indeed, when Jonathan Dimbleby was writing his authorized biography of the Prince, conscious of her role in history she told him that in private she had been against the marriage but (as a courtier) had ‘thought it wrong to share her doubts’. According to a private source she made a deathbed statement to Dimbleby along the same lines. She also told him, ingenuously: ‘If I’d said to him [Charles], “You’re making a very great mistake”, he probably wouldn’t have paid the slightest attention because he was being driven’⁹ – ‘driven’ not only by his family but by the counsels of Camilla, still an important part of his life, and the weight of public expectation that he should do his duty.

Barry, a close and interested observer, thought that ‘things seemed to be blossoming’ from the time of the Birkhall visit. Charles invited her to Highgrove, his new house in Gloucestershire, the first he had personally owned. Charles was delighted with it, but Diana, according to Barry, was unimpressed. It was a standard Cotswold manor house, small by Althorp standards, in a mess and with only three habitable bedrooms. Diana did not yet know it, but the principal appeal of Highgrove for Charles was that it was only fifteen miles’ drive from Bolehyde Manor, home of Andrew and Camilla Parker Bowles. It was also within easy reach of one of his favourite hunts, the Beaufort, where Charles’s relationship with Camilla was well known to members, who described her as riding ‘in his pocket’. Just at that time, Prince and Princess Michael of Kent were negotiating to buy their country house, Nether Lypiatt, in the same area. They were surprised to find Charles bitterly opposed to their proposed purchase, and it was only through the intervention of another member of the Royal Family that he was persuaded to give up his opposition. Friends surmised that the only reason for his opposing the Kents’ buying Nether Lypiatt was that they might become aware of his closeness to Camilla, Princess Michael herself being a keen rider to hounds.

Diana was driven down to Highgrove by Barry three times that autumn, where she would hang around the house and gardens waiting for Charles to return home from hunting, a foretaste of her life to come. After tea and a simple early dinner together, Charles drove her back to London. The mere fact of his presence seemed to him to be enough for her and to compensate for hours of dreary waiting. Perhaps Diana liked it like that: it was a very old-fashioned courtship along the lines prescribed by Barbara Cartland, now her step-grandmother.

Public interest in the possibility of Diana as Charles’s future bride was reaching fever pitch. ‘HE’s IN LOVE AGAIN! LADY DI IS THE NEW GIRL FOR CHARLES’ blared the headline in the Sun on 8 September 1980. James Whitaker, stationed at Balmoral, had been the source of the tip – off. Watching from a vantage point above the River Dee, where Charles was fishing, he had spotted Diana looking back at him from behind a tree, using her make-up mirror: ‘What a cunning lady, I thought,’ he later wrote. ‘This one was clearly going to give us a lot of trouble . . . You had to be a real professional to think of using a mirror to watch us watching her.’¹⁰ That same month, Nigel Dempster, the gossip columnist of the Daily Mail, broke the story that Diana was Charles’s new girlfriend and that his choice had been approved by ‘the two happily married women who influence [him] most on personal matters, Lady Tryon and Camilla Parker Bowles’.¹¹ In London reporters laid siege to Coleherne Court, posting themselves near Mary Robertson’s mews house and outside the Young England kindergarten. It was there that one day, in an effort to persuade them to go away, Diana allowed herself to be photographed against the sun in a Madonna-like pose, holding one child in her arms and another by the hand. The sun streamed through her long, flimsy skirt revealing the stunning legs which were among her principal features and inflaming male passions all over the world. The tabloid reporters besieging her flat fell in love with her: by invariably being polite, tolerant and good-tempered, she made them her friends. She flirted with them, giving them the famous ‘shy Di’ look with lowered eyes. ‘You knew deep down it was a game she played, and a very clever one . . . not cynical, but by doing this, she won everybody over,’ said tabloid reporter Harry Arnold.¹² Worse still for Diana than the relentless lenses outside the flat were the midnight telephone calls from the press; she concealed the strain it caused her, but in private she wept.

Charles took elaborate precautions so that he and Diana could meet in London without attracting press attention. Diana would ring Barry, say simply ‘It’s Diana’ and tell him where she could be picked up – from Ruth Fermoy’s Eaton Square flat or from Jane Fellowes’ house at Kensington Palace. Returning home she would be dropped behind the block of flats at Coleherne Court to escape the media stationed at the front. To Barry she appeared still as a simple, giggly teenage girl with an addiction to sweets – Yorkie bars and bags of toffees. But she was already showing signs of trying to influence the Prince’s appearance, buying him sweaters and ties in his favourite blue and replacing the formal shoes custom-made for him by Lobb of St James’s with more modern slip-ons. ‘You’ll never get away with those,’ Barry warned her. ‘He’s always had his shoes made to order.’ Diana just grinned and that evening he saw the Prince walking around trying to get used to them.

Diana was invited to celebrate Charles’s thirty-second birthday (14 November 1980) with an intimate Royal Family gathering at Wood Farm, the ten-bedroom house on the Sandringham estate which the family use when the Big House is closed. Saturday was spent shooting but the gathering hordes of media at the gates curtailed Diana’s visit. Their attentions meant that Charles and Diana could not even take a walk together so a stratagem for her escape to London was arranged, cutting short the planned long weekend. She was safely back at Coleherne Court while the media mob remained freezing in Norfolk at the gates of Wood Farm. Both the press and the royal staff were convinced that an engagement would be announced. In Norfolk the Duke of Edinburgh grumbled about the ‘bloody press’ spoiling his shooting.

While Diana was still at Sandringham the ‘Royal Love Train’ scandal broke: on 16 November the Sunday Mirror printed a story that on 5 November Diana had slipped into the royal train as it stood in a Wiltshire siding to spend the night with Charles. The story was patently untrue as far as Diana was concerned; that night, with Charles, she had attended a party for Princess Margaret at the Ritz and was photographed arriving there. She had gone home to Coleherne Court at about 1 a.m.; Charles, however, had left earlier around ten or ten thirty and had taken the train to an official engagement; the mystery woman was supposed to have boarded the train at about midnight. The report created a furore: the Queen was furious and her press secretary, Michael Shea, was deputed to write to the editor of the Sunday Mirror denying the incident. ‘The Woman on the Train’ was certainly not Diana, but many people believed – and still do – that it was Camilla. The official line has always been that there was nothing whatever in the story. James Whitaker, however, then writing for the Daily Star, followed up the story which had first come through a local press man. ‘I went down to the siding . . . I went up into the signal box and I paid the signal man some money and I saw his log book, and they’d logged a person getting on the train . . . down the road at the station . . . they had an official log of somebody going on that train, a woman.’¹³ A respected media commentator found the Palace reaction fishy. ‘Diana was definitely in London at the time with witnesses; all the Palace had to do was to simply say “Diana was in London, she never went near the train and this is the proof.” Why didn’t they do it? Because Diana herself would have been spooked by that story. Who was on the train? So they had to deny the train incident altogether.’¹⁴ In the face of repeated official denials, the editor of the Sunday Mirror, Bob Edwards, came to believe that he had made a mistake over the story, certainly as far as Diana was concerned. At Christmas 1986, however, he received a Christmas card from Woodrow Wyatt, later Lord Wyatt of Weeford, the Labour politician and journalist who, despite his politics, moved in royal circles. The message was: ‘It was Camilla.’

The Royal Love Train incident added fuel to the Duke of Edinburgh’s ‘ultimatum’, as Prince Charles interpreted it, that he should either propose to Lady Diana Spencer or stop seeing her as he would damage her reputation and expose her to persecution by the press if he continued to do so. To the Royal Family, and indeed to Charles, Lady Diana seemed the answer to their prayers. ‘Characteristically,’ Dimbleby wrote, ‘the Queen refrained from tendering her opinion but Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, who was a significant influence, counselled strongly in favour of marriage, as did her lady-in-waiting, Ruth Fermoy . . . Diana Spencer’s grandmother.’¹⁵ The Queen Mother is said to have told Charles one day at Royal Lodge, ‘There’s Diana Spencer – that’s the girl you should marry. But don’t marry her if you don’t love her. If you do, grab her because if you don’t there are plenty of others who will.’ Ruth Fermoy added to the general pressure for the marriage by putting it about that if Charles did not marry Diana after all this fuss, she would be ruined. One of the Queen Mother’s courtiers was overheard to say over tea at Clarence House, when the question of the engagement seemed to be hanging fire, that ‘Charles must make his mind up, if he discards Diana she’s got no future at all . . .’ One of his colleagues told him, ‘You must be joking – a pretty girl of nineteen, just because the Prince of Wales doesn’t want to marry her, you’re living in another world.’ Ruth Fermoy, she said, had been putting it about that ‘she’ll be finished if the Prince of Wales discards her now’. ‘Arrant rubbish,’¹⁶ the courtier commented.

After Christmas at Althorp, where, according to her stepmother, Diana spent much of her time walking in the park crying over Charles’s failure to propose, she joined her flatmates for New Year’s Eve before driving down to Sandringham to join the royal house party, using her grandmother’s silver VW Golf instead of her own well-known Mini Metro. Once again the press mob turned up in force, disrupting the Duke of Edinburgh’s shooting party and rendering him apoplectic, while Charles bitterly told the press pack that he wished their editors ‘a nasty New Year’. Diana spent the time waiting for Charles to return from shooting, and slipping away to visit her old home, Park House, now standing empty and deserted. But the feelings between the couple were becoming stronger, and obvious to the court insiders watching them. At Sandringham that January a lady-in-waiting remembered that they turned back the carpet to dance and ‘they danced like mad, Prince Charles and Diana – there was this electric thing between them’. Later she asked the couple, ‘That was the moment you fell for each other, wasn’t it?’ Both of them, she said, agreed.¹⁷ A second visit to Sandringham had to be abandoned because of press attention but instead Charles and Diana had a secret rendezvous at Highgrove. Diana spent the night there and on the return journey to London Barry, who was as usual driving her on a ‘dawn dash’ to get back to her kindergarten job, recalled, ‘She was a very happy young woman . . . relaxed, smiling – and not chattering.’ Charles had not actually proposed, but something must have happened to make Diana think that he would. Diana later told friends that Charles had proposed to her in Camilla Parker Bowles’s garden at Bolehyde.¹⁸ Whether he actually proposed to her there, or gave her a very strong indication that he would like to marry her, is open to speculation.

Close friends of Charles’s (later among Diana’s foremost enemies) became alarmed at the possibility. Norton and Penny Romsey, Mountbatten’s grandson and his wife, were against Diana from the beginning. They thought that she was in love with the idea of being Princess of Wales, rather than with the Prince himself. They noticed her friendly relationship with the press pack pursuing her and that she seemed to pose for their cameras. According to Dimbleby, in January 1981 both of them raised their doubts with the Prince, to no avail. Close observers such as Barry denied their allegation: ‘She was most certainly in love with her Prince,’ he stated. ‘She was always available when he called, and she always fitted in with his plans. She obviously adored being with him, and in January the Prince wrote a memo to his office telling them to give her a copy of his weekly engagements so that she would know where he was’¹⁹ – the first time he had ever done so for a girl. Whatever the world may have thought, Diana was deeply in love with Charles and continued to love him even after he had rejected her. ‘She hero-worshipped him,’ one of her staff was to say. He was the older man in whom she thought she could place her trust, who would love her and look after her as her own father never had.

Nicholas Soames, for one, dared not raise the subject with the Prince but told the Duke of Edinburgh’s private secretary, Lord Rupert Nevill, what he thought about the Duke of Edinburgh’s ‘ultimatum’, calling the proposed engagement ‘a mismatch’. Soames, Winston Churchill’s grandson, was the same age as Charles whom he had known in his early teens fishing in Scotland. He had first met Diana at Birkhall, when he had come away ‘amazed’ at the possibility that Charles might marry ‘this very sweet teenager’. ‘She was very sweet,’ he said, ‘[but] it was just like talking to a teenager and not a very clever one either.’ Soames and the Romseys were part of Charles’s inner circle of friends and absolutely devoted to him. They were quite sincere in their views that this marriage would be a disaster: they were right in the end but not just for the reasons they gave.

Charles himself was, he confessed, in a ‘confused and anxious state of mind’. ‘It is just a matter of taking an unusual plunge into some rather unknown circumstances that inevitably disturbs me but I expect it will be the right thing in the end.’ ‘It all seems so ridiculous,’ he added, ‘because I do so very much want to do the right thing for this Country and for my family – but I’m terrified sometimes of making a promise and then perhaps living to regret it.’²⁰ And so Charles dithered on, as indeed he well might. He was in love with Camilla, who satisfied his every need. She was, as she herself said, his ‘Girl Friday’ as well as his lover. And he was attracted to Diana but not in love with her. Everyone, meanwhile, was getting impatient for an outcome. Charles went for his annual skiing holiday in Klosters, accompanied by the Palmer-Tomkinsons, who were initially in favour of Diana and who bolstered his wavering resolve.

‘The feeling was,’ Diana recalled, ‘I wish Prince Charles would hurry up and get on with it. The Queen was fed up. Then Charles rang me up from Klosters and said: “I’ve got something to ask you.” Instinct in a female, you know what’s coming. Anyway, I sat up all night with my girls [her three flatmates], saying “What do I say, what do I do?” bearing in mind that there was someone else around.’ ‘Anyway, next day I went to Windsor and I arrived about 5 o’clock and he sat down and said: “I’ve missed you so much.” But there was never anything tactile about him. It was extraordinary, but I didn’t have anything else to go by because I had never had a boyfriend. I’d always kept them away, thought they were all trouble – and I couldn’t handle it emotionally, I was very screwed up, I thought. Anyway, so he said, “Will you marry me?” and I laughed. I remember thinking, “This is a joke”, and I said, “Yeah, OK”, and laughed. He was deadly serious. He said: “You do realize that one day you will be Queen.” And a voice said to me inside: “You won’t be Queen but you’ll have a tough role.” So I thought OK, so I said: “Yes.” I said, “I love you so much, I love you so much.” He said: “Whatever love means.” He said it then. So I thought that was great! I thought he meant that! And so he ran upstairs and rang his mother.’²¹

To Diana, Camilla seemed to be ever present and increasingly she had begun to question Camilla’s role in Charles’s life. ‘By that time,’ Diana recalled of the period of her secret engagement, ‘I’d realized that there’s somebody else around. I’d been staying at Bolehyde [Manor, the Parker Bowleses’ home] an awful lot and I couldn’t understand why she [Camilla] kept saying to me, “Don’t push him into doing this, don’t do that.” She knew so much about what he was doing privately . . . if we were going to stay at Broadlands, I couldn’t understand it. [Broadlands was now the property of Mountbatten’s grandson, Norton Knatchbull, Lord Romsey, and his wife, close friends of Charles and also of Camilla.] Eventually I worked it all out and found the proof of the pudding and people willing to talk to me.’²²

Nevertheless, in a state of euphoria, Diana went off to Australia to spend three weeks with her mother planning the wedding. Frances was determined that on this last holiday on their own before the wedding, Diana should have some real peace and privacy. While the press besieged the Shand Kydd ranch at Yass and Peter Shand Kydd asserted that Diana was ‘on a different continent’, Frances and Diana were together in a rented beach house at Mollymook, 200 kilometres south of Sydney. Diana spent peaceful days incognito, swimming and surfing on the beautiful beach, not even daring to accompany her mother shopping in case she was recognized. Her stay at Mollymook was, she recalled later, ‘the last time I walked alone’. She later alleged that, during her time in Australia, Charles never once telephoned her and that when she rang him he was always out and never called back. This was another instance of her later embroidering the facts to make the picture more dramatic. In truth, according to Barry, Diana and Charles spoke ‘constantly but guardedly on the telephone’ when she was in Australia, and Charles himself said in a television interview that the first time he tried to call her the Shand Kydd household was so wary of the press that at first they refused to let him speak to her and he had considerable trouble establishing his identity. When she got back home, however, he was not there to welcome her: Michael Colborne sent Sergeant Lewis round with what Diana described as ‘this huge, huge bunch of smelly flowers’. ‘I knew they weren’t from Charles,’ she said bitterly, ‘because there was no note. It was just somebody being very tactful in the office.’

On 24 February the engagement of the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer was publicly announced. The couple were interviewed in the garden of Buckingham Palace with the Palace looming in the background. Diana looked very young, her thick blonde hair unbecomingly cut, her figure in a mumsy blue suit looking distinctly chubby, but despite her shyness she seemed more self-possessed than Charles, who was always embarrassed when faced with personal questions and uneasy with television interviews. The occasion seemed more awkward than happy. ‘Can you find the right words to sum up how you feel today?’ they were asked. ‘Difficult to find the right sort of words,’ Charles replied, glancing at Diana as she nodded. ‘Just delighted and happy. I’m amazed that she’s brave enough to take me on.’ ‘And I suppose in love?’ said the interviewer. ‘Of course,’ said Diana, grimacing shyly and rolling her eyes. ‘Whatever in love means,’ Charles famously replied. Around the world, people who watched the interview drew in their breath. It seemed to bode ill for the future. Four days later, Diana wrote in her round childish hand, in answer to a letter of congratulations: ‘Reading through all the letters, it’s amazing how many people have said that married life is the best – I wonder if I’ll be saying that in twenty years’ time!’²³

The letter was headed ‘Clarence House, February 28th’ on plain notepaper in her own hand. On the evening of the day her engagement was announced, Diana moved into the Queen Mother’s London home, Clarence House, to protect her from the press. Coleherne Court had become untenable. It was, as her Scotland Yard police protection officer told her: ‘. . . the last night of freedom ever in the rest of your life . . .’. Diana, in dramatic mode, later said that his words were ‘like a sword went in my heart’. On the bed of her first-floor bedroom was a note from Camilla, congratulating her and suggesting lunch. (When, later, the lunch took place during Charles’s absence in Australia and New Zealand, Camilla, Diana said, questioned her closely as to whether she intended to hunt or not, the implication being that if not, Camilla would have the hunting field – and specifically the nearby Beaufort Hunt – to herself to meet Charles.) Whatever Diana may have said later, she was in a state of euphoria on the evening of her engagement. After a dinner consisting of her elders – the Queen Mother, Ruth Fermoy and the Queen Mother’s private secretary and great friend, Sir Martin Gilliatt – when everyone else had gone to bed, she ended up in the office of William Tallon, the Queen Mother’s trusted page, where, spotting a folding bicycle, she seized it and spent the rest of the evening riding round the room singing, ‘I’m going to marry the Prince of Wales, I’m going to marry the Prince of Wales . . .’²⁴

One can only imagine the corner into which the Prince has painted himself. His father no doubt had some choice words on the subject and instructed him to pull out his finger and get hitched. But to whom. If it is known that he [prefers women] of mature years he is in a pickle. For he can’t marry anyone with a past. ’Tis said that he didn’t even screw [xx] which is ludicrous as surely that is the only point of [xx]. Yet it is not ludicrous if he really loves Mrs P – B . . .

Two days after the announcement of her engagement, Diana moved into Buckingham Palace, symbolically cutting herself off from normal life for ever. Buckingham Palace, to an outsider, is not a welcoming place. A huge forecourt with railings and, at the gates, police boxes and security ramps, separate it from the public. It is the official royal headquarters in London, the office of the ‘Family Firm’. Its vast grey bulk is intimidating. Inside a maze of corridors runs round a central courtyard, dark and redolent of the past, with busts on pedestals and paintings lining the walls. The Palace is quite unlike anywhere else in ordinary experience: there are courtiers, uniformed footmen and the sense that it is a great hive centring on the distant and unseen figure of the Queen. It is the physical expression of the British monarchy, formal, formidably organized, founded on dignity and deference.

Diana, ‘nineteen going on fifteen’ as one royal servant described her, felt swallowed up by it, its walls isolating her from her ‘girls’ at Coleherne Court, even her own family. She was allotted her own suite of rooms on the Chamber (former Nursery) Floor overlooking the Mall. The rooms, which had previously been occupied by the royal governess and nanny, Miss Peebles and then the famous Mabel Anderson, were smaller than the usual palace rooms. She had a sitting room, bedroom and bathroom and the use of the old nursery kitchen. She spent her days there sewing, reading and watching television, particularly her favourite soap, Crossroads, and waiting for Prince Charles to come home to his apartment down the corridor. She had been given her own aide in the Prince of Wales’s office on the ground floor. Oliver Everett, formerly the Prince’s assistant private secretary, had returned to his diplomatic career with a post in the Madrid embassy, but had been recalled at the Prince’s special request in February 1981 to work with Diana. Lady Susan Hussey was assigned to keep her company and ‘show her the ropes’. Diana shared the office with the Prince’s people, including his principal private secretary, the Hon. Edward Adeane, who had succeeded David Checketts.

Edward Adeane was a courtier born and bred: great-grandson of the famous Lord Stamfordham who had been private secretary to Queen Victoria and George V, and son of Lord Adeane, private secretary to George VI and to the Queen. Witty and erudite, he had a sense of humour and independence of mind which made him unusual for a courtier, and he was later to resign when he felt that the Prince of Wales would not take his advice. He was kind to Diana, although somewhat baffleded by her, uneducated but charming teenagers not having been part of his life hitherto. Diana teased him and, despite her objection to his cigarsmoking, later recorded her affection for him. ‘Edward Adeane,’ she said, was wonderful – ‘we got on so well. Very much the bachelor and I was always trying to find him the ideal woman but I didn’t succeed at all. He said: “I know some nice ladies who might be ladies-in-waiting. Will you come and see them and meet them?” So I said “Yes” to them all, even though I didn’t really know them . . .’ ‘What I can remember,’ she added, ‘is that I didn’t want to do anything at all on my own. I was too frightened. So I stuck with whatever Charles did.’²⁷

Yet despite the stated willingness of people to help her, no one really knew what to do with her, the first Princess of Wales since before the First World War. The root of the problem was that no one had thought of a real role for her beyond the fact that she was to be the wife of the Prince of Wales. People went about their appointed business in the Palace while Diana floundered, not knowing what to do with herself. She was frequently alone, as Charles’s official duties took him on tour to Australia and New Zealand and all over the country. ‘What amazed me was that there was nobody in the family who was going to take her under their wing and tell her what to do or instruct her,’ said a member of the household. The fairy tale was proving unexpectedly dreary, lonely and intimidating.

Diana yearned for ‘ordinary people’ who would make her feel at home. One such person was the Prince’s personal secretary, Michael Colborne, who was, as his title suggests, privy to the personal side of Charles’s life. Colborne did his best to provide a simple common-sense approach in the office: his informal duty was ‘to look after Lady Diana’. That had been the refrain since the first time Colborne had met her before the engagement on a dramatic day at Highgrove after the Prince’s favourite horse, Allibar, had died under him while steeplechasing. The Prince, dreadfully upset, had had to go ahead with his official duties, taking a helicopter to Bristol for an appointment. ‘Please look after her,’ Charles had said before leaving. ‘She was then just nineteen and quite chubby, nicely chubby,’ Colborne recalled, ‘[but] I realized straight away very attractive. And the first thing she said to me was “Can I call you Michael?” And I said, “Well his Royal Highness does, yes.” She said, “Will you call me Diana?” I said, “No, because you know, later on you’re going to become the Princess and then we can’t do it, so let’s start from now. I just call you Ma’am and that’s it . . . We got on very well and then from the engagement to the wedding she shared my office at the front of the Palace . . . she didn’t like me going to lunch, always wanted me to stay . . . just to talk about things.’

Diana may have been ‘Lady Diana’ and born into the aristocracy but her haphazard upbringing and her education at cosy, undemanding schools had left her unprepared to face this upper-class manifestation of the British Establishment, with its disregard for other people’s feelings. Despite the fact that her brother-in-law, Robert Fellowes, was the Queen’s assistant private secretary, she was suspicious and resentful of the Palace courtiers – ‘the household’ as they were known – who were all older than she was and used to toeing an invisible social line. To her they were the ‘grown-ups’ who misunderstood her and wanted to bend her to their ways. ‘Grown-up’ was a word which she often used and not in a favourable sense: to be ‘grown up’ was to inhabit an oppressive, alien world. The ‘grown-ups’ unfortunately included most members of the household supporting the Royal Family and particularly those among them like Oliver Everett and Lady Susan Hussey who were deputed to guide her. Diana was classless in a way in which only people to whom class really means nothing can be. And she was rebellious, disliking being told what to do.

The innate coldness and distance of the members of the Royal Family when they were at Buckingham Palace, each with their own separate apartments, did not help to make her feel at home. ‘What was amazing in the Palace,’ a member of staff recalled, ‘was that each household was a water-tight compartment. I couldn’t understand how the Queen didn’t know what the Duke [of Edinburgh] was doing and the Duke didn’t know what the Queen was doing. Then they’d go somewhere and the Queen Mother would be on the other side of the street . . .’²⁸ The Queen, the one member of the family revered by Diana, was busy and remote. Diana would go to see her and even take her little presents of china figures: despite what many people have inferred the Queen was, according to a member of Diana’s staff, ‘very, very supportive’. Charles was fond but also always busy and he had little time to devote to his adoring young fiancée. Diana missed the life of giggling and spontaneous humour she had been used to in the past. ‘I missed my girls so much I wanted to go back there and sit and giggle and borrow clothes and chat about silly things, just being in my safe shell again . . . I couldn’t believe how cold everyone was [at Buckingham Palace].’²⁹

She gave small lunches in her sitting room for her ‘girls’ from Coleherne Court, and for her mother and sister Jane. Mostly, however, she was alone, and for comfort she turned to the staff at Buckingham Palace, just as she had at Park House and at Althorp. Diana would spend evenings at the home of Colborne, dubbed ‘Uncle Michael’, and his wife Shirley. She also became friendly with several other members of the Palace staff. One of them was Mark Simpson (whose title was nursery footman although the nursery no longer existed) who had been deputed to look after her. Simpson was one of those Walter Mitty-like people, gay, fantastic and fantasizing, who are attracted to the romance of royalty like moths to a flame. Mark had started life as a nursery footman at the age of seventeen, looking after Prince Edward, taking him to school and accompanying him to the dentist. Good-looking, popular and ever helpful, he was a favourite for royal tours and holidays and on Britannia. Two days after her wedding, when she was on the first part of her honeymoon at Broadlands, Diana wrote a ‘thank-you’ letter to Simpson: ‘I just wanted to thank you for all your kindness and patience you’ve showed towards me since I moved into B[uckingham] P[alace],’ she wrote. ‘My stay was made so much easier by your company as it got terribly lonely & we had so many laughs & for that I can’t thank you enough.’ Mark, it appears, had supplied her with secret bowls of cornflakes (later she said that the eating disorder of binging and vomiting first attacked her at this time and her yearning for bowls of cornflakes was probably a symptom of this). The letter was written in almost schoolgirl terms with an endearing fallibility as to spelling and the ‘smiley face’ illustration which she loved to use. ‘The bad news is that I haven’t eaten any cerial [sic] – sob. How am I going to cope without my bowls of cerial . . . ’³⁰

On her twentieth birthday, 1 July 1981, Diana gave a small party for six of her friends among the Palace staff with a chocolate cake specially made for her by one of the chefs. The guests included her dresser (lady’s maid), Evelyn Dagley, Cyril Dickman, the fatherly Palace steward and most senior member of the staff, her policeman, the housemaid who looked after her rooms and the chef who cooked the cake. A year later she wrote to Mark Simpson: ‘Of course I remembered last birthday – I drank too much Pimms and ate a mass of chocolate cake . . .’³¹ ‘In the afternoon,’ Cyril Dickman remembered, ‘she came wandering down to where my office was . . . and she gave the boys all a slice of cake. They never could get her to take it back up. But you know that was the sort of person she was.’ ‘In those days, that first six months before they were married, she used to go down to the kitchens an awful lot, because the Palace is a lonely place and if you’re on your own . . . She didn’t have anything in common really with a lot of them, the Family were all working – they had all their engagements . . .’ said another member of staff. ‘She did a lot of this, particularly at Sandringham and Balmoral, she just wandered around everywhere. Nowhere was safe, the pantry and the kitchen . . . I think she just wanted to talk to people . . . At Sandringham she often appeared after tea and she went through and saw the pantry boys and had a chat with them and then she had tea with Mervyn [the chef]. She’d just wander in . . .’³²

‘It seemed funny to us,’ Stephen Barry commented, ‘she just wasn’t adjusting to being royal.’ Some people disapproved of Diana’s familiarity with the staff. A senior member of the Queen Mother’s household disliked the way that one of the Palace staff in particular would feed her with malicious gossip about the household. On one occasion at Sandringham he put her firmly in her place: ‘She was sitting in the pantry, swinging her legs. And she looked at me and said, “You don’t approve of me being here, do you?” He replied, “No, Your Royal Highness, I don’t. Not at all. This is servants’ quarters, you should be in the saloon learning your craft.” And I turned on my heel, and walked out,’ he recalled.³³

Of all Diana’s family, Frances Shand Kydd was the one who gave her the fullest support. While her father, still partially estranged after the Raine row, turned up once or twice, he was still suffering the effects of his stroke and a member of staff described him as ‘charming, but not always on the ball, always delightful but not going to be a forceful view because he just wasn’t at that stage of his existence’. Frances, however, was ‘very, very sharp, very on the ball . . . always around asking questions’. But while Johnnie Spencer was a welcome figure with the family, Frances had been persona non grata since her ‘bolting days’, and her defensive attitudes undoubtedly affected her daughter. ‘From February to July she [Frances] was in and out all the time and I found her such an attractive woman – beautiful blue eyes like Diana’s – then she sort of disappeared,’ recalled one official. In the run-up to the wedding, Frances occupied herself with taking Diana shopping for her trousseau. She pressed royal aides to tell her how much her daughter would be given in clothes allowance, only to be gently rebuffed with the assurance that it would be what was necessary. It was Frances who recommended that Diana use her interior designer, the South African-born Dudley Poplak, for the redecoration of Highgrove where Charles had had the rooms painted white, leaving Diana a clean slate.

Part of Diana’s problem lay in her basic insecurity coupled with a determination to be her own person. Insecurity made her suspicious of people like Lady Susan Hussey and Oliver Everett, who had been in the Prince’s life before her arrival and whose loyalty would inevitably be to him. Susan Hussey was, as one courtier described her, ‘a female Mountbatten’ to the Prince: ‘Sue Hussey is totally and utterly devoted to the Prince and is probably the closest person to him . . . in a way because of her proximity to the Queen and how long she’d been there, she knew him absolutely backwards and he could relax totally with her . . . she has remained one of his best friends.’ Lady Susan ‘had huge loyalty to him, she wanted Diana to prove to be a success so therefore she gave all her support to her . . . she couldn’t have been more helpful, friendly, courteous . . .’³⁴ Outwardly Diana got on with Lady Susan but inwardly she was as suspicious of her as she was of anyone who had been close to the Prince. She would ask Colborne, ‘What hold does that woman have on my husband?’ Oliver Everett did his best to help her understand the role that was facing her, providing lists of biographies of previous consorts and, earlier that year, even suggesting she should learn some Welsh in advance of a Welsh visit. His suggestions were treated with scorn. She never read the books and her reaction to his idea about learning Welsh was ‘You must be joking’. She did not like the implication that she was ignorant and she resented being told what to do. Had she taken his advice to read about the lives of previous Princesses of Wales she might have been more conscious of what was expected of her. She might also have been aware of the suffering of Queen Alexandra, wife of Edward VII, at his repeated infidelities and particularly at his long-term relationship with Alice Keppel, great-grandmother and role model to Camilla Parker Bowles.

Diana found the intense, unceasing media spotlight focused on her difficult. Every step she took beyond the Palace was watched and recorded, making her nervous and afraid of getting anything wrong. The outstanding example of this was the episode of ‘the dress’, when Diana wore a strapless black dress to a gala at the London Guildhall on 9 March. Unwittingly she had broken a long-standing royal rule that the family never wear black except for mourning, as Prince Charles discouragingly informed her. The décolleté showed too much soon-to-be-royal flesh. ‘I remember my first [royal] engagement so well,’ Diana said as she relived the memory for Andrew Morton. ‘So excited. Black dress from the Emanuels [Elizabeth and David, designers of the wedding dress] and I thought it was OK because girls my age wore this dress. I hadn’t appreciated that I was now seen as a royal lady . . . Black to me was the smartest colour you could possibly have at the age of 19. It was a real grown-up dress. I was quite big-chested then and they all got frightfully excited . . . It was a horrendous occasion. I didn’t know whether to go out of the door first. I didn’t know whether your handbag should be in your left hand or your right. I was terrified really – at the time everything was all over the place.’³⁵ When Diana confessed her feelings to Princess Grace of Monaco, whom she greatly admired, Grace replied: ‘Don’t worry, it gets worse!’ On one occasion in a car with the Queen’s press secretary, Michael Shea, she broke down in tears on seeing a huge picture poster of herself. ‘I can’t take this any more,’ she sobbed.

From that time, her weight plummeted. According to her later account this is when she began to suffer from the eating disorder bulimia, gorging herself on bowls of cereal and custard and then vomiting. Later she said that it was first prompted by a chance remark by Prince Charles at the time of the engagement, when he put his arm round her waist and joked, ‘Oh, a bit chubby here, aren’t we?’ Diana, like all bulimia sufferers, could not live with the image of herself as ‘chubby’: she felt she could control her life by forcing her body to lose weight. No one seems to have noticed what she was doing except Carolyn Bartholomew, who recorded: ‘She went to live at Buckingham Palace and then the tears started. This little thing got so thin. I was so worried about her. She wasn’t happy, she was suddenly plunged into all this pressure and it was a nightmare for her. She was dizzy with it, bombarded from all sides. It was a whirlwind and she was ashen, she was grey . . .’³⁶

The happiness of her relationship with Charles was punctuated by her increasing fears over Camilla, concerns which he failed to understand. As he saw it, he had promised himself to Diana and that was it. Where other men might have tried to dissemble their feelings, he could not. ‘Prince Charles always wore his heart on his sleeve,’ said a friend. He was too honest for his own good, too emotional to realize the consequence of what he was saying, as the many indiscreet outpourings in letters to friends quoted by his biographer Dimbleby showed. Diana hero-worshipped him: ‘Charles is very deep,’ she told Robert Runcie, Archbishop of Canterbury, when they met that spring for premarital instruction. The more she worshipped, the more jealous and possessive she became. The rows were always about Camilla. The evening before Charles left for a prolonged tour of Australia and New Zealand, Camilla telephoned when Charles and Diana were talking in the library together. On realizing it was Camilla, Diana magnanimously left the room to let them talk. When she saw him off at the airport the next day, she was in tears, later confessing that they were prompted by Camilla’s telephone call rather than Charles’s imminent departure. On another occasion Diana, who was given to eavesdropping, heard Charles in his bath talking to Camilla on the telephone: ‘Whatever happens I will always love you,’ he said. Friends say that was typical of the way he spoke to his women friends but to Diana it was a confirmation of what she suspected. ‘We had a filthy row,’ she said. Ascot week in June, just two weeks before the wedding, was another difficult moment: for a nineteen-year-old girl the pressures of being treated by the public and the media as if she were a film star were taking their toll. ‘Diana was going through a terribly difficult time of adjustment and was feeling very claustrophobic,’ one observer said. During tea at the back of the royal box at the races she was practically in tears and had to be escorted home early.³⁷ And during that week Charles expressed his worries to an old friend, one of his mother’s ladies-in-waiting: ‘She’s so much younger than me, do you think that matters?’ he asked. As she commented later:

It was not like talking to someone who was just about to get married and was thrilled to bits and longing for his life with her. And I – if it had been anyone else – I think I would have said, ‘Look for heaven’s sake’ . . . I mean if it had been one of my children and they weren’t quite sure – I would have said to them, ‘Well, if you’re not sure, don’t do it.’ But you couldn’t say it to him really because everything was planned. Mugs being made with their faces and all these kind of things. You can’t suddenly abandon something like that with ease. And I don’t think he actually wanted to – I think he felt that he wanted it to be right but I could tell there were doubts and it was very sad . . .³⁸

By June, Diana’s distress and her jealousy of Camilla – what Charles referred to as her ‘other side’ – had affected him. The jolly, happy teenager who had enchanted them all at Balmoral six months earlier had metamorphosed into an emotionally demanding young woman. Coming as he did from a family not given to introspection over the effect of their behaviour on others, Charles was simply surprised, never imagining that his own behaviour or the royal surroundings to which he had become so accustomed could have had anything to do with it. Only in March, shortly after the engagement, he had written to friends, ‘I do believe I am very lucky that someone as special as Diana seems to love me so much. I am already discovering how nice it is to have someone around to share things with.’ Significantly, he added: ‘Other people’s happiness and enthusiasm at the whole thing is also a most “encouraging” element and it makes me so proud that so many people have such admiration and affection for Diana.’³⁹

Neither Spencers nor Windsors had doubts about the marriage. The Duke of Edinburgh had expressed his delight to a friend three weeks before the engagement was announced: ‘Isn’t it wonderful that they’re going to get married? We’re delighted.’ And they were, the friend confirmed, adding, ‘It all seemed so perfect . . . They were so anxious for him to get married that they didn’t look beneath the surface. They knew she came from a broken home but they thought a family atmosphere would be the answer . . .’⁴⁰ If Ruth Fermoy harboured doubts, as she later told Dimbleby, she was too much of a courtier to express them, beyond warning Diana in what must have been the understatement of the year: ‘Darling, you must understand that their sense of humour and their lifestyle are different and I don’t think it will suit you.’ But according to Johnnie’s cousin Robert Spencer, ‘I remember what an amazing thrill [it was] for us that the Prince had chosen our Diana, and everybody thought at the time, with no reason not to, that she was young enough to be totally moulded into conforming as the future Queen.’⁴¹ Only the perspicacious Princess Margaret foresaw the breakers ahead, the rock on which the marriage would founder. To a friend who said how delighted they must be with the wedding, she replied: ‘We’re extremely relieved but she [Camilla Parker Bowles] has no intention of giving him up.’⁴²

The biggest explosion came over her discovery of a bracelet from Charles destined for Camilla with the initials GF (for ‘Girl Friday’) engraved on it. It was on Michael Colborne’s desk among a heap of trinkets intended as farewell presents for various former girlfriends, including Susan George. Colborne was called out of the office and Diana went in, saw the parcel, opened it and rushed out. ‘What have you done to Lady Diana?’ the Prince’s private secretary, Edward Adeane, asked Colborne as he came into the office. ‘She rushed out in tears and disappeared.’ Colborne saw her later ‘pretty red-eyed’. When she accosted Charles about it he told her bluntly that it was indeed for Camilla and that he was going to give it to her at a farewell lunch on 27 July, two days before the wedding. At polo at Tidworth barracks, the Wiltshire headquarters of the 13/18 Hussars, on 25 July Diana was seen to be distraught, unable to bear the thought of that farewell lunch. With reason she doubted that it would really mean farewell. Sententiously, Dimbleby underlined the couple’s noble acceptance of fate: ‘His [Charles’s] feelings for Camilla Parker Bowles had not changed but they had both accepted that their intimacy could no longer be maintained . . .’⁴³ If his feelings for Camilla and hers for him were unchanged, then one might justifiably wonder how he could contemplate marrying a twenty-year-old girl who adored him. The 1980s were not the 1890s: the Alice Keppel/Edward VII relationship had required a complaisant Queen Alexandra, a role which Diana would not be prepared to play.

On the day Charles presented the famous bracelet to his lover, Diana lunched with her sisters, Jane and Sarah. When she told them she couldn’t go through with the marriage, their pragmatic response that it was too late to draw back – ‘Don’t worry, Duch, your face is on the tea towels so it’s too late to chicken out now’ – cheered her and made her laugh. Despite her adoration for Charles, Diana had had doubts over her ability to cope with the consequences of the marriage. Her close friend Carolyn told James Whitaker that not only was Diana worried about the age gap between her and Charles but she had realized that she had not had a single weekend away with Charles unless they were at Bolehyde Manor or Camilla was otherwise present. While Charles was away in Australia, she had gone to her father in tears, confessing her doubts about the marriage.⁴⁴ At the wedding rehearsal in St Paul’s forty-eight hours before the ceremony, Diana said, she broke down, sobbing: ‘Absolutely collapsed . . . because of all sorts of things. The Camilla thing rearing its head the whole way through our engagement and I was desperately trying to be mature about the situation but I didn’t have the foundations to do it and I couldn’t talk to anyone about it.’⁴⁵ If she did truly collapse, she did it in private. Eleven-year-old Sarah Jane Gaselee, one of her bridesmaids who was there, recalled: ‘I don’t think she was stressed by it or anything; it didn’t appear that way. What I do remember is that she and Charles were really in love as far as I could see, at that age. I saw them cuddling on the sofa and during the rehearsals they had their arms linked and were skipping down the aisles. It was all really happy, or so I thought.’⁴⁶

But that night, at the Queen’s ball at Buckingham Palace, two guests found Diana in tears: Charles had danced only once with her and the remainder of the evening with Camilla, and gone off with her.⁴⁷ The story that Charles spent the night with Camilla at Buckingham Palace after the ball as Diana slept in Clarence House is, however, untrue. Diana was not at Clarence House on the night of the ball, but in her apartment in Buckingham Palace, and she and Charles left the ball at the same time. Camilla was at the ball with her husband and in any case it is highly unlikely that the Prince would have taken such a risk at that juncture. The two of them may have spent some time alone together earlier in the evening but the ‘spending the night’ story, told to James Whitaker, allegedly by Barry (who, however, denied it in his own book), was also categorically denied by Michael Colborne: ‘It didn’t happen, that’s for certain. It couldn’t have happened without a lot of people knowing . . .’ Later, Andrew Parker Bowles told Nigel Dempster the story was absolutely untrue. Nor was Charles with Camilla on the eve of the wedding: with Diana he hosted a party at Mark’s Club in Mayfair for his own staff who had not been invited to the wedding ball.^a Afterwards Diana went back to Clarence House to sleep, while Charles returned to Buckingham Palace, where, after the fireworks in Hyde Park, he spent some time at a window watching the crowds in the Mall and chatting to Lady Susan Hussey.

At Clarence House with her sister Jane on the eve of the wedding, Diana had a fit of pre-wedding nerves and was violently sick. But that night Charles sent her a signet ring bearing the Prince of Wales feathers and a loving note which said: ‘I’m so proud of you and when you come up I’ll be there at the altar for you tomorrow. Just look ’em in the eye and knock them dead.’ From her room at Clarence House Diana could hear the explosions of the magnificent fireworks display in Hyde Park celebrating her wedding eve. It was certainly too late to chicken out now.