Diana

The feelings of jealousy of Camilla which had haunted her throughout her engagement melted away. Charles was her husband, the ‘other woman’ just a face in the crowd. As she made her way down the aisle, she spotted Camilla in pale grey with a pillbox hat, her son Tom (Charles’s godson) standing on a chair beside her. The image remained with her but at the time, she said, she thought, ‘Well, there you are, that’s it, let’s hope that’s over with . . .’² As if to emphasize, however, how much the Parker Bowles family was part of the royal circle and inescapably, therefore, of her own future, Camilla’s husband Andrew rode beside the Queen’s carriage in his role as Commander of the 1st and 2nd divisions of the Sovereign’s Escort both to and from St Paul’s, and then accompanied Charles and Diana as they drove away from Buckingham Palace en route to the first stage of their honeymoon at Broadlands.

Despite the delirium surrounding her, Diana was alert enough not only to keep a watchful eye on her ailing father but even to notice that one of her bridesmaids, Catherine Cameron, aged only five, who had ridden back from the ceremony in a horse-drawn carriage, had suffered an allergic reaction to the horse and arrived at Buckingham Palace with streaming eyes and swollen face. A shot taken by Patrick Lichfield shows her concern for the little girl as soon as they arrive, bending down to comfort her while the Queen extends a comforting hand. ‘I noticed that she was extremely quick to comfort the child,’ Lichfield remembered. ‘She had a lot of other things to think about: she had to be on the balcony, do the waving, she had to go and do the group photographs again and again and again, you know, so the whole thing was ahead of her, and yet she found time to make this gesture, which was in itself touching . . .’³ That night she took the time to telephone the people who had helped her, including make-up artist Barbara Daly. ‘I thought how remarkable that was,’ Daly remembered. ‘I can’t imagine many people doing that after a day like that. There are many beautiful people in the world, but Diana had that extra thing, which is really a very genuine warmth because she had a very loving and compassionate heart.’⁴

There was a happy family atmosphere about the whole occasion at the Palace epitomized by Lichfield’s informal shot of an exhausted Diana collapsed on the floor in a heap of ivory silk and taffeta, surrounded by her giggling bridesmaids, her quizzically smiling husband and two grinning brothers-in-law. At the going away, as the open carriage trailing tin cans and balloons attached by Edward and Andrew pulled away from the portico, the Queen started running behind it waving as everyone threw confetti. ‘It felt just like a family wedding,’ recalled Mountbatten’s granddaughter, India Hicks, one of the bridesmaids, ‘until they pulled outside the gates and it changed . . .’⁵

Diana and Charles spent the first two days of their honeymoon at Mountbatten’s country home, Broadlands, now the property of Norton and Penny Romsey and the scene of Charles’s courtship of Camilla just under ten years earlier. They slept in the same bed the Queen had used on her honeymoon with Prince Philip in November 1947. They then (to the indignation of the Spanish, whose royal family had consequently boycotted the wedding) flew to Gibraltar to join the royal yacht Britannia. Honeymooning on a yacht with a crew of two hundred was not a romantic experience. As Charles’s official biographer put it, ‘even an intimate dinner by candlelight was hardly a private affair, accompanied as it was by the camaraderie of senior officers at the table and a band of Royal Marines playing a romantic medley in the background’.⁶ Diana’s hopes of romantic bliss had been dashed by the time they left Broadlands: ‘Second night, out come the van der Post novels [sic] he hadn’t read. Seven of them – they came on our honeymoon. We read them and we had to analyse them over lunch everyday,’ she later recalled .⁷ A lady-in-waiting at Balmoral discussed the horrors of honeymoons in her day with Diana, who replied, ‘Well, I bet your husband didn’t read a book by an old boy called Jung the whole time.’⁸

Nor was there any hint of romance in the bridegroom’s correspondence: ‘All I can say is that marriage is very jolly and it’s extremely nice being together in Britannia,’ he wrote on the second day of their cruise. ‘Diana dashes about chatting up all the sailors and the cooks in the galley etc. While I remain hermit-like on the verandah deck, sunk with pure joy into one of Laurens van der Post’s books . . .’⁹ It sounded as if he drew more ‘pure joy’ from van der Post’s books than from the company of his young bride. He might have been an indulgent father observing the antics of a newly acquired puppy. Moreover, the shadow of Camilla, whom Diana thought she had left behind, hung over the Britannia honeymoon. ‘She was on the telephone every day,’ a friend said. ‘And on Britannia. I know that’s true because the poor girl was so upset that she told lots of people afterwards when she came back . . .’¹⁰ Diana was devastated when Charles opened his wallet one day and two photographs of Camilla fell out. A few days later, as they were about to receive the Egyptian President, Anwar Sadat, and his wife for a banquet on board, Diana noticed that Charles was wearing cufflinks engraved with entwined ‘Cs’, a present from Camilla. Charles himself admitted that they were and was unable to understand why he shouldn’t have worn them on his honeymoon. Years later Diana told friends in crude terms that their physical relationship on board Britannia had not been a success.¹¹ Poor Diana, for all her youth and beauty, was sexually inexperienced, unable to compete on that level with the women Charles had known before. However honestly he tried, the image of Camilla was hard to erase and the two experiences did not compare.

Not once in his authorized version of the marriage did Dimbleby indicate that Prince Charles loved Diana. In his biography of the Prince, written after the Waleses’ separation, he followed the official line which was to demote Diana’s importance in Charles’s life and to emphasize her difficult behaviour. Yet after Diana’s death, Charles was to tell several intimate friends, ‘There was a time when we were very much in love.’¹² As a royal relation recalls, ‘When he talks about her sometimes, he will say, “You know we did love each other very much.” Suddenly out of the blue, “You know there was a time when we did love each other very much.” So there was something.’¹³ All her life Diana herself always maintained that Charles was in love with her when they married and, so it seems, for a relatively brief time and in a limited way, he was. An eyewitness who was at Balmoral every holiday said that for the first few years ‘when they used to arrive at picnics and things hand in hand they really looked devoted’.

Dimbleby’s account of the couple’s honeymoon, both on Britannia and through September at Craigowan Lodge on the Balmoral estate, is limited to biased descriptions of her state of mind. It was, in the Dimbleby version, Diana’s failure to understand her husband that cast shadows over the relationship: ‘For the Prince it [their stay at Balmoral] was a blissful interlude at his favourite home, complete with his books, his fishing rod, and his friends. He assumed that Diana would share his happiness but . . . she was quite unable to surrender herself to his good humour. So far from being the focus of her husband’s attention, he seemed to go out of his way to avoid the moments of intimacy that she craved. Instead – or so it appeared to her – he seemed either to prefer his own company or to have others about him as well as her.’¹⁴ Van der Post also featured at Balmoral: Charles’s idea of bliss was to read the sage’s books out loud to Diana as they sat on a hilltop. The familiar surroundings brought back to her images of Camilla who had so often been in attendance at Birkhall. She dreamed of her at night, constantly suspecting Charles of ringing her up to ask her advice about his marriage. It was an obsession: as Dimbleby put it, ‘Her insecurity about his feelings for her were fed by the canker of jealousy.’ Yet both sides, writing with hindsight, exaggerated the misery of that time: at an informal photo call on the banks of the River Dee, the couple looked fond and Diana radiant. She was already transformed from the mousy girl of a few months previously: her hair was coloured blonde and with bare brown legs and tanned complexion she looked for the first time not just beautiful but glamorous. Sarah McCorquodale told James Whitaker, with whom she was constantly in touch, that Diana had far preferred the time at Balmoral to the days on Britannia , that Charles had been sweet to her, leaving loving notes and trinkets under her pillow, ‘things which she found enchanting’.¹⁵

Yet, again with hindsight, that Deeside photo call said it all. While Diana, gazing seductively at the press, her legs adopting a ballet position, draped a possessive arm round his shoulders, Charles looked stiff, nervous and worried, the dead salmon lying as a trophy at his feet. In fact at Balmoral as at Buckingham Palace, Diana was finding it difficult to adapt to life in the Royal Family. She felt hemmed in and isolated, incapable of reaching beyond the invisible barrier which now separated her from the rest of the world. ‘All the guests at Balmoral coming to stay just stared at me the whole time, treated me like glass,’ she recalled, ‘[but] as far as I was concerned I was Diana.’¹⁶ She herself had none of the deference which most people felt in the presence of royalty, or even of gratitude that she had been made a member of the exclusive circle. She thought, almost certainly correctly, that her in-laws and their friends and staff were looking at her critically. She thought they were old-fashioned and stuffy, they regarded her as ‘a silly girl’. She clung to her sense of herself as ‘Diana’ which was battered by her perennial feelings of inadequacy; her behaviour, her sulks and bouts of tears, her leaving the table early at dinner or on occasions even refusing to come down, were interpreted as rudeness. The family operated by their own rules and traditions; her refusal to follow or even to try to understand them mystified her in-laws, utterly unused to being confronted by such behaviour. Her upbringing had not taught her to behave ‘properly’, as her resentment at her husband for always offering a drink to the Queen and the Queen Mother before turning to her showed. Even in ordinary families mother and grandmother would come before wife in such circumstances. ‘But I had to be told that that was normal because I always thought it was the wife first,’ she complained.¹⁷ A royal relation commented, ‘At Balmoral on their honeymoon she started saying that she wouldn’t come down to dinner and him being asked by the Queen to go upstairs and persuade her, and then coming down red-faced and saying “I can’t”. Can you imagine any of us with our mother-in-law, can you imagine anybody, whether they were staying with their mother-in-law in a hovel somewhere, who would actually start to not do what their mother-in-law wanted on their honeymoon?’¹⁸ Diana’s defiant behaviour might have been allowed by her indulgent father at Park House: anywhere else, however, it would have been considered unacceptable and at Balmoral in the presence of the Queen it was outrageous.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, her relations with her royal in-laws were not easy. Although she revered the Queen, the aura which surrounded her mother-in-law, coupled with her innate shyness and reserve, precluded intimacy. Diana had once said that she saw her role as building bridges between her husband and his parents. Charles was in awe of his mother and intimidated by his father: it soon became obvious to Diana that no such role was envisaged for her either by her husband or her in-laws. The Duke of Edinburgh, always sympathetic to a pretty young girl, did his best to jolly her along, whirling her into dinner when she hung back overcome with shyness. Prince Andrew she had known and liked since childhood, Prince Edward she simply ignored. Princess Anne, the strongest character of the younger royals, had little time for Diana. Of the older generation, the Queen Mother remained an enigma to Diana herself, although those who knew her well detected she did not like her; that Diana’s grandmother, Ruth Fermoy, later joined the ranks of those who denigrated her could be taken as an accurate reflection of her friend and employer’s views. Only Princess Margaret was to become Diana’s real friend and champion within the family. In her youth she, like Diana, had been the media star of the Royal Family, glamorous, idolized and criticized: no stranger to defiant behaviour herself, she empathized with Diana, seeing in her a reflection of her own rebellious self. Yet a relation denied that the Royal Family was ‘cliquey’: ‘When you’re staying there, it’s not that they’re all very cliquey together, and it’s not all in-jokes which you can’t join in on . . . they’re not really touchy-feely, close-knit - it’s not the in-joke that’s going on from last night, it’s not at all them and us. In a funny sort of way they’re quite distant with each other. It doesn’t make it too difficult for a stranger coming in, because you’re not coming up against a family that is so strongly knit together that you are the object of attention, that you’re on the outside and they’ve all got their in-names and their in-this and you don’t know what they’re talking about. But,’ she added, ‘if you don’t like the great outdoors, if you don’t like getting wet, putting on your gumboots, I can see that it’s not the easiest, and I think that in the lead-up to this whole thing, she must have given the impression that she did like the great outdoors . . .’¹⁹

Part Scottish herself through her grandmother Ruth, Diana always denied disliking Scotland: she loved visiting her mother on the Isle of Seil. ‘I was rather surprised that she took so violently against that sort of [Balmoral] life,’ said a member of the court, ‘because she was really quite keen when she came up for that weekend at Birkhall. They were out on the hills all the time and she appeared to be perfectly happy with it. I think it was the sort of relentlessness of it.’²⁰ What Diana hated was the regimented life of Balmoral, the emphasis on outdoor activities whatever the weather, the focusing on shooting and stalking and fishing (all sports which she detested) as the raison d’être of life there. Despite being on holiday, the Royal Family adhered rigidly to the forms of previous years: women guests would be expected to change their clothes four times a day, from something to wear down to breakfast into sporting clothes for lunch and out with the guns, back to change for tea and then into a long dress for dinner. Courtiers would be in attendance and, to a young girl like Diana, the whole place was oppressive and deadly dull.

It was becoming obvious to perceptive observers that the couple were basically incompatible. Both were psychologically needy, each seeking comfort, devotion and reassurance which the other could not provide (and, in Charles’s case, had already found in Camilla). Charles was old for his age, Diana young for hers. Despite his essential kindness, Charles was too spoiled and self-centred to begin to understand Diana, while for her part she was too insecure and blinkered to understand the man he was, or to make allowances for him. The pattern of his life had been set for years and he was not about to change it for anyone. Frustrated, Diana began to play the tricks which she had played on her father to get what she wanted: sulks, tears, withdrawal, utter self-absorption. Perplexed and worried, Charles did what he could to placate her, inviting her flatmates up to stay and summoning ‘Uncle Michael’ from London to spend the day with her. ‘I was summoned to Scotland, rung up on the Saturday night to catch the night sleeper on the Sunday and I spent probably the worst day of my life. I was having my breakfast in the kitchen and then he [Charles] came in and said he was going stalking with Lord Romsey . . . and then the Princess came in and we disappeared into the front room of Craigowan and didn’t get out of there until four o’clock. There was a big white clock there and I think it went the slowest it’s ever been in its life. At some stage I think it was going backwards. We had tears, we had temper, we had everything that day . . .’²¹ Asked what the Prince’s particular sin that day had been, the source replied that ‘he’d started that attitude of his “You find your enjoyment, I’ve got mine” – and she didn’t like the killing thing, to go stalking up a hill was about the last thing she wanted to do’.²² Laurens van der Post, whose works had cast a shadow over her honeymoon, was recruited to analyse Diana, the result being mutual incomprehension. ‘Laurens didn’t understand me,’ Diana later recalled. ‘Everybody saw I was getting thinner and I was being sicker and sicker. Basically they thought I could adapt to being Princess of Wales overnight . . .’²³ She was sent down to London to see analysts and psychiatrists and given a Valium prescription in a vain attempt to calm her. Vain because there could be no effective cure for her unhappiness, which was caused by basic insecurity and the tortured fears of unrequited love. The shadow of Camilla had lain over the relationship from the start. According to Dimbleby, Charles’s friends with whom he had ‘agonized’ before ending the relationship with Camilla, considered that Diana had ‘already reached the point of obsession’.

Media interest in Diana remained intense to a degree which no one had foreseen. Unworthy and inadequate as she felt herself, Diana somehow managed to cope with being the focus of this huge attention from public and media. On their first public engagement, a three-day tour of Wales in October, the world’s press turned up in force, Japanese and American television crews descending on Welsh villages and towns none of them had ever heard of before. Diana was feeling ‘ghastly’, as one of her staff described it: on the second day of the tour she received confirmation of her pregnancy. She felt sick and apprehensive of people’s expectations of her. ‘I cried a lot in the car, saying I couldn’t get out, couldn’t cope with the crowds . . . He [Charles] said, “You’ve just got to get out and do it’ ’ . . . He tried his hardest and he did really well in that department, got me out and once I was out, I was able to do my bit.’²⁴ She did it superlatively, kneeling to talk to the children, bending down to speak to the elderly in their wheelchairs, exuding sympathy and compassion. ‘She was just remarkable,’ said a newly appointed member of her staff. ‘We set off with no idea what we were really meant to be doing. She immediately saw how to deal with people. She would bend down to children, she got down on her haunches. Talking to very elderly men and holding their hand while they were sitting out in the cold. Probably completely tongue-tied, totally overwhelmed at actually meeting the Prince and Princess of Wales – but she would just talk. It was just that ability to know how to talk to people which was there from day one. She knew instinctively how to react to people, just ordinary people . . . And she had been told that she should make a speech in Welsh, standing up.’ Despite her shyness, Diana, who had been coached in the language by an elderly peer, managed it, no easy task for a twenty-year-old.

‘This was her first walkabout as such,’ remembered Dickie Arbiter, who was, at the time, one of the royal correspondents accompanying the tour, ‘and she did it as if she had done it all her life, trying to please everybody, switching from one side of the road to the other, because all people were doing was “We want Di, we want Di, we want Di”. And that’s something he [Charles] had to get used to . . . the trouble was that he was playing the supporting role, not the starring role. That started almost immediately with the first visit they did . . .’²⁵ ‘People wanted to see her, not him, and he couldn’t stomach it,’ said an aide. ‘I was with Prince Charles and nobody came to us,’ said a former police protection officer on the tour; ‘everybody wanted her and that was the start of it really. I think she started thinking and people started looking at her as a divine something . . .’²⁶ Diana was not yet the glamorous being she later became; she was not well dressed and her hair had returned to mouse, yet no one who saw her operating on that first tour could doubt the enormous rapport she had with the crowds. It was a new way of being royal although nobody realized it at the time. Nor did anyone in the Royal Family, not even Prince Charles who had been very supportive and protective of her during the Welsh tour, appreciate what an achievement it had been for the twenty-year-old girl with no training for the role. ‘She was amazed,’ said one of her staff, ‘that after those few days in Wales nobody said anything, that the Queen didn’t pick up the telephone and say “Well done”. It was the lack of recognition that she got – and the same from Prince Charles – if he had come to her and said well done or a little bit more . . . But again, he had done it all his life: he didn’t realize what it would have been like for a relatively shy twenty-year-old.’²⁷

Pregnancy increased Diana’s malaise, her sickness and her instability. When they returned to London at the end of October, they had no home of their own, just a relatively cramped apartment on an upper floor of Buckingham Palace: bedroom, sitting room, study, bathroom and two dressing rooms. Diana’s dressing room was the only room which was exclusively hers. ‘There was no thought,’ an aide said, ‘as to where she could see her girlfriends, or where she might be able to make a cup of coffee. You know, those silly little things. If she wanted to have a cup of coffee or tea or boil an egg, she had to summon a footman.’²⁸ Charles was used to it; he had been born and brought up in the Palace. Nonetheless, as one of Diana’s aides said, ‘It’s extraordinary that a man of thirty-two was still living in Mummy’s home and it made it very isolating for her . . . if you walk across the courtyard from the gate to the Privy Purse door, the world and his wife are looking at you. And for her friends who were aged nineteen, twenty, it’s quite intimidating. And then you have to be escorted upstairs by a footman . . .’²⁹ ‘One or two of Diana’s girlfriends were quite worried about her loneliness,’ another courtier recalled. ‘In the early days when she was pregnant with William, I know she rang one up and said, “Can I come round? I’m so terribly lonely . . .” ’³⁰

The imbalance between her empty life and Charles’s busy one became more marked. He had a programme of official duties, she had none. ‘One thing she couldn’t accept was this wonderful word called Duty,’ a member of Charles’s staff said. ‘I sat with her one day and she was talking about it and I said, “If you get that diary for next year out, you could write it up: Trooping the Colour, Remembrance Day Service, do a couple of royal tours, you’ll go to Balmoral, you’ll go to Sandringham, you’ll be shooting ... you could virtually fill half of that up anyway, and you’ve got to keep on doing it. And unfortunately, your husband, it’s his duty. He lives in awe of his mother so you’ll never change him.” ’³¹ Diana, besotted with Charles, still failed to comprehend why he could not spend more time with her. Worse still was that no one seemed to take her seriously. ‘She was disregarded and that was what probably hurt more than anything else,’ said one of her staff. Another recalled that she used to complain ‘that there was no equality in the marriage and that the Prince of Wales never for one second considered her to be an equal which was an impossible situation for her’.³² This royal attitude is common to all the senior members of the family, who never consider other people, their lives, their feelings or opinions. Many of the courtiers share the same view, hard for outsiders to comprehend. For Diana, determined to cling to her sense of self, it was baffling and frustrating to a degree. As one of Diana’s staff remarked to Dimbleby, no one had approached her predicament with imagination: ‘I don’t think they had really thought about her role . . .’

It was not until September, three months after the wedding, that ladies-in-waiting were appointed to her, an indication of the strange lack of foresight and consideration where she was concerned. The ladies-in-waiting included Lavinia Baring, Hazel West and Anne Beckwith Smith. Anne Beckwith Smith was ten years older than Diana but she had been at West Heath and knew Diana’s sisters, so there was common ground. Much of their time was taken up with the deluge of presents and correspondence generated by the wedding and then by the announcement of Diana’s pregnancy. One ‘wonderful’ woman who had taken early retirement from Downing Street was there to cope. ‘She was just marvellous, she wrote wonderful letters to children and grown-ups, and she kept a record. I think we had something like 28,000 letters, presents and cards, just for William. Every little old lady was knitting beautiful things, a layette and things like that. We always put the things she might like or something that was special aside.’³³

Away from the gloom of Buckingham Palace, Christmas at Windsor was a rare period of peace and happiness for Charles and Diana. Christmas sees the Royal Family at their jolliest, with silly jokes and clowning, something which Charles greatly enjoys, and an exchange of the most commonplace and utilitarian presents which amazed Diana. Charles wrote to a friend: ‘We’ve had such a lovely Christmas – the two of us. It has been extraordinarily happy and cosy [one of the Prince’s highest accolades] being able to share it together . . . Next year will, I feel sure, be even nicer, with a small one to join in as well . . .’³⁴ Sandringham in January, however, was a different matter. Diana had always disliked going there, even as a child. The proximity of her beloved Park House, now deserted, upset her with its memories of freedom lost and hopes disappointed. As at Balmoral, the focus was on shooting, which she detested and Charles (despite his brief flirtation with Eastern philosophies) greatly enjoyed. Again, it was a source of conflict.

I threw myself down the stairs [at Sandringham]. Charles said I was crying wolf and I said I felt so desperate and I was crying my eyes out and he said: ‘I’m not going to listen. You’re always doing this to me. I’m going riding now.’ So I threw myself down the stairs. The Queen comes out, absolutely horrified, shaking – she was so frightened. I knew I wasn’t going to lose the baby; quite bruised round the stomach. Charles went out riding and when he came back, you know, it was just dismissal, total dismissal. He just carried on out of the door.³⁵

This was a fabrication, a dramatization of an incident which was purely an accident told to Andrew Morton through a desire to shock. Diana may well have had a row with Charles beforehand in an effort to prevent him going out riding but, according to eyewitnesses, she did not throw herself down two flights of stairs but tripped as she went down wide, shallow steps at the bottom, landing in front of a member of staff who was talking to the Queen Mother. Diana even rang a member of her staff at the time and told her what had happened: ‘I must tell you, you will probably hear about it – I tripped and fell down the stairs. And what luck, what would happen but I had to land at the feet of the Queen Mother. Oh God, if I had to trip why did I have to do it in front of her? . . .’³⁶ This misrepresentation was typical of much of Diana’s dramatic view of her past distorted by the reality of her position ten years later. According to newspaper reports at the time, Charles called a local doctor and sat with Diana until he arrived. When the examination proved that neither she nor the baby had suffered injury, she rested and he took her to a royal barbecue several hours later.

Next month, Charles took Diana off to the Brabournes’ house, Windermere, on Eleuthera in the Bahamas, staying with their son Norton and his wife Penny for what he described as ‘a second honeymoon’. This time the tabloids excelled themselves: James Whitaker of the Star and Harry Arnold of the Sun supervised intrusive photographs of Diana, five months pregnant and wearing a bikini, from a nearby beach. ‘CAREFREE DI THREW ROYAL CAUTION TO THE WINDS TO WEAR HER REVEALING OUTFIT’ ran the Sun’s headline. The Queen was outraged, denouncing the tabloids’ ‘unprecedented . . . breach of privacy’. Just how carefree Diana was is open to question; the Romseys intimated to Dimbleby that she objected when Charles wanted to read or paint and openly expressed her boredom with his conversation. They were also probably among the ‘tiny circle of his most trusted friends’ with whom Charles discussed Diana’s misery and who urged him to tell her to ‘pull herself together’ and stop indulging in self-pity. Charles apparently insisted that he was to blame and that it was too much to expect anyone to be married to the heir to the throne. While this may well have been true, he would have to have been very obtuse not to realize that the core of his wife’s despair was her suspicion that he did not really love her.

Tabloid pressure on Diana increased: media expert Roy Greenslade called the bikini photographs the great turning point in the relationship with the press: ‘Here was an intense interest, sexual interest really, in this woman. The press – editors and reporters – were in love with Diana . . . she looked terrific, she sold magazine covers, no one could get enough of her.’³⁷ Pressure intensified until finally, on 21 June, she gave birth to William Arthur Philip Louis. ‘William had to be induced,’ she told Morton,³⁸ ‘because I couldn’t handle the press pressure any longer, it was becoming unbearable. It was as if everybody was monitoring every day for me . . .’ For Diana, guarding her privacy had become an obsession; but courtiers regarded the birth of a son to the Prince and Princess of Wales as an important royal event to be shared with the public, as all births, deaths and marriages have traditionally been. Diana had what was known in her office as a ‘foot stamp’ when her officials told her that they would come to the hospital to keep the people informed. ‘What’s that got to do with you?’ was her furious response.³⁹ William’s birth came just over a month before their first wedding anniversary: Diana had had little time to accustom herself to being Princess of Wales and now she was a mother; and not just any mother, but the mother of the future King. Charles, who attended the birth, was ecstatic, writing to his godmother Patricia Brabourne: ‘I am so thankful that I was beside Diana’s bedside the whole time because by the end of the day I really felt as though I’d shared deeply in the process of birth and as a result was rewarded by seeing a small creature which belonged to us even though he seemed to belong to everyone else as well! I have never seen such scenes as there were outside the hospital when I left that night – everyone had gone berserk with excitement . . .’⁴⁰