Chapter Eight

Whatever in Love Means

I’ve got something to ask you.

—Charles to Diana, February 1981

FOR A MAN WHOSE SPIRITUAL AGE has always been somewhere north of sixty-five, it was difficult to see the smitten, romantic teenager, Diana Spencer, as a future wife, let alone the future Queen of England. Was Prince Charles ever in love with Diana? “She is exquisitely pretty, a perfect poppet…but she is a child,” he told a woman friend.

Steve Kroft of CBS’s 60 Minutes says that in his pre-interview research for a 2005 segment on Prince Charles he found that every American woman he spoke to unfailingly raised the response Prince Charles made to the question “Are you in love?” on the day of his engagement to Diana as a reason why they had negative feelings about him.

The famous exchange on February 24, 1981, began, “I am positively delighted and frankly amazed that Diana is prepared to take me on.” When pressed by the BBC interviewer, “And in love?” Diana answered immediately, “Of course,” with a girlish giggle. Then Charles said it: “Whatever ‘in love’ means.”

It was a killing caveat that would haunt his life. At the time, however, this remark was not used in any of the newspaper reports of the broadcast. In a collective Rose Mary Woods moment, the print press literally erased “whatever in love means” from their accounts. No one, it seems, wanted to break the spell. Three thousand people had shown up at Buckingham Palace for the Changing of the Guard hoping to hear the official confirmation of the engagement and, when it came through, the euphoria was captured by a band of the Coldstream Guards striking up “Congratulations.” On the videotapes with voice coach Peter Settelen in 1991–1992, Diana claims that she was “absolutely traumatised” when her fiancé came out with the line but “didn’t dare” to ask him what he meant. Ever since, the words have served to symbolize the cold heartlessness of Diana’s royal groom.

But was Charles’s damning answer really a window on a chilly soul—or just that old reflexive upper-class instinct that quickly moves to negate any show of messy feeling? Self-deprecation is Charles’s mode of expression, and it’s never served him well as a means of mass communication. It could also have been a sudden burst of truth, from a painfully sincere man, that involuntarily broke through the fairy story and demanded to be heard; the Prince had briefly got confused and thought he was in a different movie, cinema vérité instead of Hollywood romance. As he said to the BBC reporter after he made the remark, “Put your own interpretation on it.”

Ten years later, his authorized biographer Jonathan Dimbleby stated, “The Prince made it clear he was never in love with Diana and felt he had to propose after he came under pressure from his father”—a revelation that was duly splashed on the front page of the News of the World as, “I Was Never in Love with Diana.” The headline stung the Princess so much she prodded the News of the World the next day to release the photos of Charles and herself cavorting ecstatically on the beach in the Bahamas on their second honeymoon in 1982 in Eleuthera. (The News of the World obliged, publishing the pictures under the headline “The Liar King.”) The interviews for Dimbleby’s book were conducted in the bitter aftertaste of a broken marriage—and there is no more reason to trust that the feelings the Prince expressed were true than we should believe each of the miseries Diana recounted to Andrew Morton. All these later statements must be seen as the early salvoes of their divorce wars.

In 2005, Charles’s marriage to Camilla cemented the received wisdom that his ties with her were always too deep to break. Their mellow romance became the new fairy story. But the Prince had shown that he was capable of at least infatuation with women other than Camilla. He was nuts about Anna Wallace; he loved being with Dale Tryon; and there is no doubt he was utterly charmed and beguiled by Diana in the early days of their relationship. Three days before the wedding, Diana was seen horsing around in the dining room at Broadlands, having grabbed Prince Charles’s Army cap after a visit to Tidworth Barracks. She whirled around with it on her head as Charles roared with laughter. Mark Bolland, Prince Charles’s communications guru in the nineties, has no doubt: “He did love her in my view.” A former member of the Waleses’ staff remembers a romantic moment the Prince conjured up for Diana for their first wedding anniversary at an uninhabited royal residence. “He took over Queen Charlotte’s house in Kew, and I sent over a cold dinner. They took the candelabras from Kensington Palace and had cold lobster.” Years after her death, Charles would occasionally betray a lingering respect and affection. Once when Charles was raking leaves at Highgrove, Bolland remarked on a sweater he was wearing and Charles said, “Diana bought it for me. She had terribly good taste about those kind of things.” At an event in St. James’s Palace for “Children of Courage,” Charles scored a hit with his easy, unpatronizing manner with the children. “Diana told me how to do that,” said Charles. “She said you have to crouch down to their level and talk to them.” Even though Bolland owed his allegiance to Camilla, he thought on such occasions, “Why the hell didn’t you two sort it out?” Three days after the funeral, a confidante of the Queen Mother much trusted by Prince Charles was moved by the sad sincerity of his admission, “You know, whatever they say, when we got married we were very much in love.”

So why was the courtship such a fraught affair? It was a collision of romantic expectations and inflexible certainties. Charles had waited so long to get married, he had become the toxic bachelor in Sex and the City, impaled on a life of public duty and private indulgence that left little room for anyone who hoped to share it. He was uncertain about Diana, yes, but perhaps more uncertain about marriage itself and how his bride would cope with “La grande plonge,” as he liked to call it in his flowery way. A former aide later opined: “What Diana could not understand was that duty rules his life. You can be sensitive but still come back to feeling that you will always do the thing that your mother has always done before you. It’s a very German family, not open to embracing; Diana yearned for that.”

On his tour of India, the press hounded Charles for a commitment, but they were asking him to make clear feelings that were not yet clear even to himself—something calculated to panic any bachelor. “I can’t live with a woman for two years, like you possibly could,” he ruminated aloud in an off-the-record aside. “I’ve got to get it right first time because if I don’t, you’ll be the first to criticize me.” “And then,” said Arthur Edwards, “we thought, ‘This is the one.’”

The One was furious that Charles did not call from India. Sarah Spencer, suspicious that her little sister had pulled off the romantic coup she had believed would be hers, wound Diana up further by probing the course of the romance. Diana confided to Mary Robertson, for whom she was still nannying two days a week, “I will simply die if this doesn’t work out. I won’t be able to show my face.” Robertson noted that since she and Charles had few meetings and almost none of them were private, her infatuation with him must have been based on her romantic image of him combined with his lofty position. But there was so much more to Diana’s longing than personal ambition: there was a checklist of expectations—Daddy’s pride in his little girl, Mummy’s return from the cold as the mother of a royal bride, the Sarah contest settled, her rescue fantasies finally fulfilled, marriage to the Prince that could never, ever be broken. Everything she longed for, ironically, was everything Charles feared. The cornered Prince confided to a friend in a letter in January 1981, “I do very much want to do the right thing for this country and for my family—but I am terrified sometimes of making a promise and then perhaps living to regret it.”

The Prince was by now in such a tortured state of ambivalence it was several days after his return from an added-on trek in the Himalayas that he finally picked up the phone. Diana told Lady Colin Campbell, “I was spitting with anger…I knew he’d call. So I took the receiver off the hook. And left it off for days. I did it to teach him a lesson. Let him chase me a little.” Whitaker says that he was informed by the nattering royal valet, Stephen Barry, that on return from India Prince Charles spent a couple of stolen days with Camilla. Old habits die hard; there was no pressure there.

The Christmas of 1980 was a tense business with Diana en famille at Althorp and Charles with the Royal Family in Windsor. Diana’s cousin Robert Spencer, who came for the Althorp Christmas lunch, found her wandering the garden in tears. “I rang up and spoke to Raine,” recalled Lady Bowker, who later became very close to the Princess. “I said, ‘How is Diana?’ Raine said, ‘She is very sad. She is in the park and she is walking alone, and she is crying because Charles is not proposing.’”

On New Year’s Eve, the most talked-about girl in the world was without a date. At the turn of every year, Princess Margaret hosted a dinner at Kensington Palace for what she termed “a few strays.” A lady novelist among the guests in 1980 was surprised to find Diana there: “Why aren’t you at Sandringham?” (where the Royals always moved for New Year). “Haven’t been asked,” Diana replied sullenly. She wore “a coral-colored organza dress of the dreariest kind,” the novelist reports. She was “quite large, and frightened, and very alarmed by all the paparazzi who pursued her nonstop. She could talk of nothing else. I felt a bit sorry for her. She was a gawky young English girl out of her depth.” The novelist’s husband had Diana as a dinner partner and found the going hard—he forgot to bring up the subject of children, so they flogged on and on about skiing. In the spirit of her mood that night, Diana was “killed” in an after-dinner game of Murder in the Dark.

Mary Robertson sensed all was not well with the romance. She was packing up to go back to America, her husband having been relocated, and she wished she could stay longer to give Diana support. Since she had told her noble nanny they were leaving London, there had been a subtle shift in their relationship from employer to mother figure, something Diana sought again and again in her life. She wrote Robertson a typically thoughtful valedictory letter. “I can never thank you enough, Mrs. Robertson, for being so kind and understanding with the whole of Fleet Street following me. Never have I adored looking after a child [more] than Patrick and thank you for providing such happiness over the year for me.” Diana showed how much the Robertson family meant to her when she learned Mary had fallen sick on the eve of the family’s departure. At the height of the press pursuit of her, she rushed over to Belgravia to help Mary pack up Patrick’s room and toys. “We were just sobbing when we said goodbye,” recalled Robertson.

The Diana frenzy was becoming seriously irritating to the Queen and Prince Philip, used to being left alone at appointed seasonal moments. The Duke of Edinburgh was so cranky about the invasive press attention, he wrote to his son advising him that Diana’s “honour” was at stake and that he should make up his mind forthwith. Any missive from Philip made Charles overreact. He carried the letter around in his pocket to show to family and friends as proof of his father’s intolerable bullying. Patricia Mountbatten, who saw it, thought the letter actually very reasonable but family Rashomon meant that Charles understood only the pressure in his father’s words and interpreted them as pushing him to marry Diana. Prince George of Denmark, who was staying at Sandringham at the time, confirmed the thunderous parental mood. He says Prince Philip made Charles know that the press speculation couldn’t drag on much longer…It was torture for all concerned. Nicholas Soames, the Prince’s closest friend, laid into the Duke’s private secretary, Lord Rupert Nevill, for allowing the Duke to force the pace. “Mismatch…doomed, utterly doomed,” he groaned to Nevill. He thought Diana “wasn’t up to Charles’s weight, to use a riding expression,” said a friend of Soames. “She was pretty childish and very unformed.”

Charles ran away again, this time skiing for a week with his friends Patti and Charles Palmer-Tomkinson in their chalet in Klosters. He was still plagued with doubts about Diana mostly on grounds of her youth. Mary Robertson believes that sexual incompatibility was one issue. “Diana was probably clueless. She had been very sheltered and he showed his lack of interest.” One of his skiing companions on the Klosters trip was struck by Charles’s visibly changing moods also reflected in his letters. “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,” Charles wrote wanly on January 28, 1981, to a friend. There’s an air of the wounded ensign picking up the regiment’s fallen standard in his call to Diana from Klosters on February 2, 1981: “I’ve got something to ask you.”

Until Prince Charles publishes his diaries, the only account we have of the big moment when he popped the question comes from Diana via Andrew Morton, heavily scored for cello and bass. It has to be read accordingly. Diana arrives in a state of high excitement at Windsor Castle at 5 P.M. on February 6, and the Prince sits her down in the nursery. He says, “I’ve missed you so much.” Diana recalls there is “nothing tactile” about the moment and she thinks it is a joke. (“I said, ‘yeah, ok,’” she told Morton). He tells her, “You do realize you will one day be Queen,” and a voice inside her says, “You won’t be Queen but you’ll have a tough role.” She goes on to tell Morton, “It was like a call of duty, really—to go and work with the people.”

The whole scene reeks of rewrite. There is not a chance in hell that Diana was thinking about duty and working with the people in that emotionally charged moment. The truth is she was flat out over the moon when Charles asked her to marry him. “She looked as happy as I have ever seen her look,” her brother, Charles, confirms when he saw her later at their mother’s London apartment. “It was genuine because nobody with insincere motives could look that happy. It wasn’t the look of somebody who had won the jackpot but somebody who looked spiritually fulfilled as well.”

“I love you so much,” she does admit to telling Charles, believing that “he was very much in love with me,” though she can’t help recasting his expression as “a sort of besotted look about him, but it wasn’t the genuine sort.” If she is accurate, it probably reflected Charles’s confused pleasure—if the nation, the press, and his parents all wanted her so much, then surely eventually he would want her, too. The momentum of events never gave him a chance to locate whatever tenderness for her had awoken in him, any more than it allowed her to discard her fantasy prince and appreciate the real man sitting on the chair next to her. By the time she talked to Morton in 1992, she did not like admitting that Charles’s feelings eleven years before may have been just as real as hers, just different. The credible bit of her account is that when Diana got back to the Coleherne Court flat that night she sat on the bed to savor her triumph. “‘Guess what?’ They said, ‘He asked you. What did you say?’ ‘Yes, please.’ Everybody screamed and howled and we went for a drive around London with our secret.”

Only one member of Diana’s circle expressed serious doubts—her mother. Before the news was announced, Frances Shand Kydd whisked Diana off to a remote hideout in Australia, to throw off the press and make her think more seriously about the momentous step. Contrary to what has been billed as her mother’s untrammeled delight, a close friend of Frances says she made every effort to dissuade Diana from marrying Charles, seeing the parallels between her daughter’s relationship and her own disastrous first marriage to Johnnie Spencer—too young, too hasty, too incompatible, too great an age gap, with too many responsibilities. “Frances was against it because she felt it was a plot by her mother, Ruth Fermoy, and as such unsound,” the friend said. Diana apparently responded, “Mummy, you don’t understand. I love him,” to which Frances replied, “Love HIM, or love what he is?” And Diana said, “What’s the difference?” After the match went wrong, Lady Fermoy got busy denying the marriage had anything to do with her. The Queen’s biographer Sarah Bradford has a “courtier” saying that Lady Fermoy was “always horrified at the prospect of an engagement,” which smacks of backspin. “Is it true?” Fermoy is alleged to have complained about the engagement. “Nobody tells me anything,” which sounds more true. It would have delighted Frances to exclude her mother from anything resembling pleasing news. Other family members were left out of the engagement loop, too, in the excitement. On the tiny Caribbean island of Mustique, where Princess Margaret was vacationing, Lord Glenconner was present when she got the telephone call and learned Lady Diana Spencer would become a member of the Royal Family. Princess Margaret’s quickly adjusting response was “I know her. I like her. In fact I love her.”

Diana’s return from Australia was greeted by an extravagant bouquet to her from Charles. His horse, alas, had better instincts. On February 20 at Lambourn, as Diana watched Charles exercising his eleven-year-old bay gelding Allibar—his first racehorse—the noble steed collapsed and died of a heart attack. Prince Charles cradled the dying Allibar’s head in his arms. Diana wept copiously. It was the first real emotional experience they shared, allowing Diana at last to do what she was so good at—offer comfort.

James Whitaker called Diana at home to talk to her about her Australian holiday and claims something about the tone in her voice told him this would be the last time she picked up her own phone. “Goodbye, Mr. Whitaker,” she said, “and thank you.”

Now that the announcement of the engagement was imminent, Diana did the debby thing and went shopping with her mother at Harrods to buy the suit she would wear to face the world as a future Queen. Their first stop was one of Diana’s favorite boutiques, Bellville Sassoon, but neither of the designers was in. She was treated with such snotty disregard by the senior vendeuse, who failed to recognize the schoolgirlish customer, she went to Harrods instead. The Cojana suit she picked off the rack was air-stewardess blue with a matronly print blouse tied by a large pussycat bow that made her look like a zaftig Sloane on the frontispiece of Country Life. The engagement ring was paid for by the Queen. Diana picked it from a tray of diamonds and sapphires presented to Charles, the Queen, and Diana by Garrard, the Crown Jewelers at Windsor Castle. Betty Battenberg (as some below-stairs wags like to call the Queen) raised her eyebrows as Diana chose the biggest rock in the batch, an enormous sapphire surrounded by eighteen diamonds set in eighteen-carat white gold, costing £28,500. It was a ring to show off with. Her choice created a profitable rage for sapphires instead of diamonds in the engagement market. Diana later claimed she didn’t like it, realizing perhaps that it didn’t fit her youthful way of life. She was not wearing it when, shortly afterward, she went with Charles to lunch at Broadlands. Lady Mountbatten tells a story of asking Diana if she might see the ring. “Diana said it was in her bag in the sitting room,” Lady Mountbatten told Gyles Brandreth. “Charles, go and fetch it,” she said. “And he did.”

The night before the engagement, Johnnie Spencer, walking with difficulty after his stroke and helped by Raine in mink and pearls, joined Diana and Charles for a festive drink in the Prince’s apartment at Buckingham Palace. It was the first time the Spencers had met the Prince since the courtship began. They stayed only thirty minutes before the Prince left to have a celebratory dinner with the Queen while Diana was escorted to sleep among the Fabergé eggs at the Queen Mother’s official residence, Clarence House. Her bedroom looked out on the Mall where in a few months time she would ride in a glass coach on her way to St. Paul’s. Her new Scotland Yard bodyguard, Chief Inspector Paul Officer, took a bit of the gloss off it all. “I just want you to know,” he told her, “that this is the last night of freedom ever in your life, so make the most of it.”

William Tallon, the Queen Mother’s page, knew there would be an engagement between Charles and Diana when the Queen Mother told him conspiratorially, “We must prepare to greet Lady Diana here. We are to give her refuge.” “So I waited downstairs all day,” he said, “but she didn’t come. In the evening the Queen Mother said to me, ‘Oh did you wait all day? No, no she is coming here under the cloak of night.’ Then I knew there would be an engagement.”

Diana found an unsettling surprise awaiting her on her splendid four-poster bed—a letter from Camilla Parker Bowles. It showed her how closely in the loop her rival was, because it was dated two days previously, when no one was supposed to know the announcement was imminent, let alone that she would be sleeping at Clarence House. “Such exciting news about the engagement,” Camilla wrote. “Do let’s have lunch soon when the Prince of Wales goes to Australia and New Zealand. He’s going to be away for three weeks. I’d love to see the ring, lots of love, Camilla.”

Very early on the big day, a member of the Queen Mother’s staff took Diana out to get her hair done by Kevin Shanley at Headlines in South Kensington in readiness for facing the world’s media. “We passed through the Equerry room,” the staff member said, “and she saw a copy of The Times which said ‘Lady Diana Engagement Today.’ She turned to me and said, ‘You see. Someone has betrayed me all already.’” The only flowers she took with her when she moved from Clarence House were her father’s.

Diana started to shrink like Alice as soon as she went through the Buckingham Palace Looking Glass, her home for the next five months. She was now carrying not only the burden of her own childhood dream but the dreams of the British nation. The population of the sceptered isle seemed to have forgotten all about the irony, alienation, and class resentment that were hallmarks of the period and turned into a jubilant Shakespearian mob rolling in patriotic sentiment. In the 184 days between the February engagement and the July wedding, $800 million worth of royal wedding souvenirs overflowed into the red, white, and blue windows of British stores.

With the eyes of the nation and half the world upon her, it’s hardly to be wondered at that Diana grew obsessed with her appearance. The sight of herself in that accursed indigo engagement suit, and “a stray comment” from Charles about how “chubby” she felt when he put his hand on her waist, sent Diana into a dieting binge that lost her fourteen pounds between March and July. It was the onset of a chronic bout of bulimia. “The little thing got so thin,” her former flatmate Carolyn Pride said. “I was so worried about her.”

A lot of brides take off weight, but between the first and last fittings of her wedding dress Diana’s waist shrank from 29 inches to 23½ inches. It became an ongoing nightmare for Elizabeth Emanuel, who made the dress and who didn’t want to cut into the ivory taffeta fabric until she had some idea of what size her client was going to be.

Too much ink has been expended psychoanalyzing the cause of Diana’s bulimia. It’s clear her affliction began as a counterattack against three heavy meals a day and the addition of a cake-laden Windsor tea, the results of which were faithfully logged in “fat girl” shots flashed around the world. Us magazine today is filled with the sunken cheeks of formerly pneumatic starlets who are turned by round-the-clock exposure into tiny famished ghosts attached to hair weaves. Shy Di now had everyone looking at her, and her blush was as crimson as the Palace carpet. Body abuse was second nature to the women in Diana’s family—like writing thank-you letters. Bulimia in a way is the polite girls’ hunger strike. First you please your host by eating with gusto, then you purge your sin by sneaking off and throwing up. After a time, it’s the purging, not the eating, that’s the craving. Diana always said it made her feel “quieter,” almost sedated afterward. When her mother’s marriage to Shand Kydd hit the rocks, Frances often “forgot” to eat and had a liquid lunch instead. Diana’s sister Sarah’s anorexia was so bad in Diana’s impressionable early teen years that Lady Elizabeth Anson, herself a “recovered” sufferer from bulimia, declined to hire Sarah for a job at her Party Planners agency. Lady Elizabeth believed that bulimia sufferers expend all their energy on secrecy and protective lies and did not want to be accused of exacerbating Sarah’s already chronic condition.

Buckingham Palace was tailor-made for a bulimic outburst. It is suffocating and empty at the same time, and everyone is trained to look the other way. Inside it’s the royal equivalent of that spooky movie The Village. The Palace’s occupants speak the same language as their neighbors, but they live in an astral plane of their own. It houses the offices of the royal officials, secretaries, comptrollers, and equerries, as well as the platoons of footmen, butlers, maids, and so on, who have their own police station, twenty-four-hour fire brigade, post office, doctor’s surgery, laundry, chapel and chaplain, electricians, carpenters, gilders, and plumbers.

All this may make it sound as if Diana was surrounded by cheerful bustle, but nothing could be further from the truth. Most of the staff labors out of sight in areas connected by a maze of underground corridors. You rarely run into people aboveground in the labyrinth of interconnecting rooms and hallways linking more than 600 rooms. A wrong turn down a corridor can lead you into the middle of an atrophied cocktail reception or medal-flashing social ceremony. The averted eyes of so many scarcely breathing factotums make all who live there feel invisible. Paul Burrell, Diana’s gossiping butler, describes the hushed world very well. Housemaids, he tells us, are not allowed to switch on vacuum cleaners before 9 A.M. to avoid disturbing the Royal Family. Instead, stiff brushes are used to sweep the deep red shag pile upright. Staff must never walk down the middle of the carpet, because it is considered presumptuous: freshly brushed carpet is fit only for royal feet. Staff walk along its twelve-inch-wide border instead. Tea trays for members of the Royal Family all have their own personal map, showing the exact position of condiments, teapots, and milk jugs.

The best servant performs his duties without being seen at all, the ultimate act of self-effacement. This requirement leads to an army of maids or footmen scurrying to hide until the coast is clear. At Sandringham House, maids dart into a walk-in cupboard under the stairs so as not to be seen when the Queen comes down into the main hall, a practice identical to the approach of the monarch in The Madness of King George. If a member of the Royal Family materializes in a corridor and it is too late to disappear, the protocol is to stop walking, stand to attention, turn with back against the wall, and bow silently as the great one passes. The sense of isolation is increased by each member of the Royal Family—Prince Andrew, Princess Anne, and Prince Edward—having their own separate apartment and staffs. They run separate fiefdoms and rarely mix. (When I visited Prince Andrew in his apartment there, it had the impersonal quality of a Harrods showroom, or a suite in the Berkeley Hotel with better pictures. Even though he is tolerably tech savvy, the TV and video screens crop up in rooms almost accidentally, as if someone had just dumped them and departed.) At weekends and holidays, the Palace is dead. It’s like visiting a prep school when everyone has gone home.

Diana was quickly introduced to the odd dichotomy of her future life. Outside the Palace walls, she was the center of attention. Inside, she was very much junior-fry in a system set up to revolve around the Queen. If Prince Philip wants to have lunch with his wife, he sends a message to her office via a page, and she sends one back to him with her reply. When the Queen is at Balmoral and Prince Charles wants to walk the grounds, he first makes sure his mother is alerted through her private secretary to ensure she would not prefer to have the grounds to herself. It is one of the sadder aspects of Diana’s story that she nurtured the hope that the Queen, of all candidates, could become a supplementary mother and role model she could emulate. Diana was in tremendous awe of Elizabeth, a feeling that only increased when she saw the burdens of the Sovereign’s life up close. “I just long to hug my mother-in-law, and tell her how deeply I understood what goes on inside her,” she wrote in a note to Paul Burrell in 1996. “I understand the isolation…” Diana yearned to please the Queen and be on relaxed terms. Once a week, as instructed, she sent a message to ask: “Is the Queen dining alone tonight?” The Queen often was—a tray on her lap in front of the television in her sitting room. More often than not, she preferred to keep it that way, whacked out herself from a week of being sucked up to.

The suite Diana was given once belonged to the royal governess Miss Peebles and was subsequently used by the sainted Mabel Anderson, Charles’s nanny, who was the spitting image of Camilla Parker Bowles. Diana was allocated a bedroom, bathroom, and adjoining kitchen, located, appropriately enough, on the royal nursery corridor. Prince Charles’s vast bachelor apartment was on the same floor but acres away.

Diana desperately missed the giggly old Sloanes from Coleherne Court. She said afterward how much she longed to go back there and sit and have fun and borrow clothes and chat about silly things. Before the engagement, she had seen the privacy of the Palace as the ultimate haven, secluded from the relentless harassment of the press, but at least the raucous newsmen who drove her crazy were real. It was easy to imagine that their solicitous nocturnal phone calls to get a quote for the late edition meant they actually cared for her. Even a woman as self-possessed as Mary Robertson found it daunting to get through the new layers of official gatekeepers protecting Diana. When her old friends did come to see the bride-to-be, there was always some pickled footman or eavesdropping flunky hanging around. “It was as though she had been whisked off to an ivory tower…never to be seen again,” Carolyn Pride said. (Today, the Duchess of Cornwall, formerly Camilla Parker Bowles, a woman thirty years older than Diana was then, finds the presence of all the royal servants so invasive that she insists on retaining her own house in Wiltshire as an escape.)

The Coleherne Court friends could sense that Diana was pulling away and were hurt about it. But Diana was ashamed to tell her former flatmates that she now saw her old besieged apartment, not the Palace cocoon, as her “safe shell.” She spent her time practicing ballet and writing letters to old friends in her rounded schoolgirl hand. “I long for company my own age,” she wrote to Mary Robertson, who was surprised and touched at how often she heard from her, feeling it should be her mother, not her old employer, whom Diana turned to for this kind of support. But Diana’s family relations had always been, well, difficult. Sarah’s rankling failure to land Prince Charles for herself precluded too much sisterly confiding of secret anxieties there. Her elder sister Jane, who lived in the grace and favor apartment in Kensington Palace with her husband Robert Fellowes, was helpful with navigating royal etiquette and often came to lunch, but she was the squarest of her sisters, fully at ease with the royal life that Diana didn’t like to admit she now found so intimidating. Their mother was a whirlwind of efficiency when it came to buying the trousseau—“so capable and elegant,” in the words of Sonia Palmer, one of the secretaries on the Prince’s staff—but Frances had never been good at sustained emotional support. It didn’t help that she had already made her views clear on the wisdom of the match.

As a wedding dress takes shape, most brides are accompanied on fittings by their mother or sister or a girlfriend. Frances went with Diana on the first appointment to the tiny Mayfair studio of the Emanuels to choose the wedding dress that would be seen by 750 million people, but after that the most famous fiancée in the world always came for fittings by herself. “We bonded with her because she got no help or advice with the dress from the Palace,” said Elizabeth Emanuel. “Nor did we. She was always alone.”

Perhaps because their lives are bound by duty, a word Diana soon began to dread, the Royals are singularly unable to detect when duty is not enough. The Queen herself learned the harsh protocols and isolation of Palace life during her childhood. For her its rigors and eccentricities were normal. Everything in royal circles is therefore always assumed and never asked about outright. To ask is to imply the possibility of a kind of weakness deemed unthinkable in the first place. It was assumed that since Lady Diana came from the nobility and was no stranger to large households, she would cope perfectly well with the transition. It was assumed that if she was lonely, or needed help, she would find a way to get on with it. It was assumed that when she started to shrink before their eyes, it had nothing to do with the pressures of the Palace experience. Prince Charles was desperately worried about how thin she was getting, but the Queen put the problem firmly down on the Spencer side of the ledger, judging it “a psychological condition brought on by problems during Diana’s difficult childhood,” as Elizabeth Longford heard it. It was altogether assumed that Diana would soon “buck up.”

To get her ready for princessly duties, the Queen did send over her closest lady-in-waiting, Lady Susan Hussey. This seasoned forty-two-year-old courtier later resented the folklore that Diana had been given no help by the Palace. She spent many hours putting Diana through her paces on such protocol as how to wave, where to hold her handbag, how to deftly end a conversation with a pressing admirer. (The Queen herself has an expert technique of disengaging her hand from sweaty grasping supplicants by an adroit little discarding maneuver.) But Diana’s antennae told her that Hussey’s loyalties would never be to her. Hussey was one of the claque of older women crazy about Charles. She was an Establishment insider and court politician whose direct links to the Monarch made Diana uneasy. “Susan would have been lady-in-waiting to all six of Henry the VIII’s wives,” said a writer in the court circle. Hussey, for her part, became vexed, another friend told me, by the fact that Diana “didn’t seem to listen.” It never occurred to Hussey—or to any of them—that the novice at the royal game had already begun to reinvent the rules.

Diana reverted to her childhood pattern at Althorp: seeking company below stairs. She was much more relaxed with the housemaids, pastry cooks, and laundry ladies than she was with the courtiers and private secretaries. She sat on the beds and chatted with the chambermaids about their lives, befriending Maria Cosgrove, who would become Paul Burrell’s wife. Accustomed to the ways of the Queen, who was hardly likely to drop in and raid the fridge, the kitchen staff felt at first discomfited by Diana’s merry visits. Chumminess, after all, was a sackable offense. But Diana had no resources for being left on her own. She seemed to them like a child, one who required to be indulged, petted, and amused, and eventually they got used to her visits and even looked forward to them.

What is clear now is that she barely knew her prospective bridegroom. By her own account, she only saw him a total of thirteen times from the beginning of their courtship to the day of their wedding. Her agonies to come stemmed from a frantic desire to find out who he actually was when prized from duty. The two were almost never on their own, which gave her little chance to learn—and now the elusive Prince was taking off for a five-week tour of New Zealand, Australia, Venezuela, and Williamsburg, Virginia. To make matters worse, just before the Prince’s departure he had taken a good-bye call from Camilla Parker Bowles, for which Diana had heroically left the room so he could speak to her in confidence. Diana’s tears at the airport were not of grief but of rage.

The Charles lobby has always maintained that Diana’s growing paranoia about Camilla at this time was neurotic fantasy—that Camilla was a back number, of little importance to Charles until five years into his collapsing marriage. According to Charles’s biographer Jonathan Dimbleby, the Prince saw Camilla on only one occasion from the moment of his engagement to Diana until 1986, and that was to say farewell. Diana’s obsessive jealousy of his ex-lover, they say, became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Yet what are we to make of the girls’ lunch, dripping with hissy subtext, that took place between fiancée and mistress while the Prince was away? As Diana recounted to Andrew Morton, it was “very tricky indeed. She [Camilla] said: ‘You are not going to hunt are you?’ I [Diana] said: ‘On what?’ She said: ‘Horse. You are not going to hunt when you go and live at Highgrove are you?’ I said: ‘No.’ She said: ‘I just wanted to know,’ and I thought as far as she was concerned that was her communication route.” Diana deduced, rightly, that Camilla was already maneuvering for assignation times, “working out what was going to be her territory and what was going to be mine.”

But a shrewd director of this drama might play the scene with a different emphasis. Isn’t it Camilla’s insecurity, more than Diana’s, that is on display here? The bride-to-be was too inexperienced in sexual war games to understand how much she had started to unnerve Prince Charles’s favorite mistress. “Camilla, in private, had a very patronising attitude toward Diana,” said her ex-brother-in-law Richard Parker Bowles, “but…she massively under-estimated the Princess.” The timing of the girls’ lunch gives the game away. It was a few weeks after Diana’s stunning appearance with Charles on their first public date, a musical recital at the Goldsmith’s Hall, in the City of London, on March 3, 1981. Diana had worn a drop-dead black décolleté number that had not been in the image of Camilla’s casting at all. Diana had seized the supersexy gown from the rack in the Emanuels’ studio when the dress she had ordered wasn’t ready, intent on convincing Charles that she was no longer a “poppet” but a heat-seeking missile. “Black to me was the smartest color you could possibly have at the age of nineteen,” she said later. “It was a real grown up dress.” Until this moment, the public and the Prince—and Camilla—had seen Diana only as a demure English rose. But when she stepped out of the limousine in that nipple-busting, black taffeta eye-popper, it was the greatest moment of sexual theater since Cinderella traded her scuffed scullery clogs for Prince Charming’s glass slippers. “Wasn’t that a mighty feast to set before a King!” the ancient beauty Lady Diana Cooper remarked to a friend about the ingenue’s sudden revelation of cleavage.

The Emanuels’ dress was all wrong, really. Royals were never supposed to wear black except to funerals, and as one fashion critic pointed out, décolleté for a concert is a disaster because it makes you look as if you are in a hip bath. But, as so often with Diana, one wrong made a right. The contrast with the subtly sophisticated air of Princess Grace of Monaco, who was also present, only charmingly emphasized the point. To the British public, Diana was every teenager announcing a sweet determination to be seen no longer as a child but as a grown-up, alluring woman. The transparency of intent made Diana vulnerable, not vulgar. Camilla could not know that in the powder room, the glamorous new Diana opened up to Princess Grace about the stress and insecurity she felt. “Don’t worry,” said the unflappable Grace. “It will get a lot worse.”

I noticed a rare unease in Camilla at this time when for Tatler magazine I went with the photographer Derry Moore to take a set of pictures of the Parker Bowleses at home. The mere fact that this private pair were opening the doors of Bolehyde Manor for the camera was out of character, suggesting a sudden need for glossy exposure. Many of the others in Prince Charles’s circle were manifesting the same unusual new friendliness to the press, only to find themselves suddenly of no interest. Compared to the freshness of the emerging Diana, the legendarily sexually confident Camilla suddenly seemed a knocked-about blonde with too much backstory. There was a sort of electric indifference between her and her husband Andrew as they posed for Derry Moore’s portrait. Camilla had all Prince Charles’s speech mannerisms. “Stowell Park? Oh it’s a brute of a hice, but it has some virry, virry nice pictures.” Andrew, for his part, spent the whole shoot staring at my chest.

It was obvious that day that Camilla was still competitive with Charles’s other blond “confidante,” the Aussie gaiety girl Lady “Kanga” Tryon, who, uncoincidentally, had been featured in Tatler the month before. (My, how those ladies were scrambling.) “All this stuff about Dale Tryon being such a friend of Charles,” Camilla said to me. “She’s never even met Diana Spencer.” It was clear that Camilla was intent on negotiating her place in Charles’s life in a new world order that would have to contain a Princess of Wales—and not just any Princess of Wales, but one who was captivating the nation. On Charles’s tour of Australia, the press noticed that he was beginning to see his fiancée through their eyes. “Wherever he went, he could see her image on the TV. James [Whitaker] and I think we saw him fall in love with the idea of her at a distance,” royal biographer Anthony Holden observed. A letter from Charles dated March 5, 1981—written soon after his engagement, to a trusted confidante—appears to back up Holden: “I am very lucky that someone as special as Diana seems to love me so much,” wrote the Prince wonderingly.

The changing status quo rattled Lady Tryon as much as it did Camilla. It surely contributed to Tryon suddenly giving up Kanga, her Knightsbridge dress business, and moving full-time to Wiltshire—“for the sake of my marriage,” she told me over lunch, but also no doubt as a run-for-cover measure. Marital and mistress dynamics alike were discombobulated by the prospect of a royal bride the media adored this much.

A more self-assured girl than Diana might have perceived that it was she who held all the cards in this contest. She could have seen Camilla off if she had chosen wiles instead of tears, sexual artfulness instead of sexual jealousy, but sadly, she was too young to know how. Instead, she obsessed about a gift, destined for Camilla, she found on the desk of Michael Colborne, Prince Charles’s personal secretary now co-opted to help with the avalanche of wedding gifts arriving by every mail. Diana had a perch in his office at the Palace. Colborne was an Australian meritocrat who had been in the Navy with Charles. The Prince had hired him over the objections of the Palace old-boy network, and he had won Diana’s trust for just that reason. He was outside the circle of self-regard. She preferred his gruff sincerity to the more courtly charm of her new private secretary, Oliver Everett, who had once been in the office of Prince Charles and had been plucked out of a promising career with the Foreign Office in Madrid to come and help with the numerous challenges of the wedding. Diana was an obedient student in Everett’s efforts to school her, but she was secretly intimidated by him. He insisted on treating her like a grown-up, producing daunting memos for her to read and background notes to study.

Colborne had a blunter approach. A colleague says he once told Diana, “After July 29, you are going to become a B-I-T-C-H. If you want six umbrellas, you’ll get them. If you want your car out in front, it will be there.” He was apparently touched by her repeated desires to “help bring the Royal Family together more,” always asking questions like “Isn’t it Princess Anne’s birthday today?” to make sure she sent a card. If it weren’t so sad, it would be comic that Diana actually thought she could turn the determinedly dysfunctional Royal Family into a warm and fuzzy replacement for her own fractured clan.

What Diana loved was to sit and listen for hours to Colborne’s stories of his time in the Navy when he had nothing to do with royal life. It took her mind off the insistent refrain of duty, that once-theoretical word that was beginning to develop associations of cold apprehension. Colborne told her, “You could get a diary for three years from now and write in it the things that you are going to have to be doing—Trooping the Color, Ascot, Order of the Garter—and you’ll know where you’ll be and what date.” She experienced her own claustrophobic details daily. One weekend in Windsor at the Queen Mother’s house, Royal Lodge, she went for a walk on her own and discovered on her return that a search party had been sent to find her.

Diana had developed an informal enough relationship with Colborne that she often rushed over to his side of the room to examine what new wedding goodie had arrived. He was out of the office talking to Edward Adeane, Prince Charles’s private secretary, when she spied an incoming package that looked interesting. She discovered it was a gold chain bracelet with a blue enamel disk bearing the initials G.F. She knew “Girl Friday” to be Charles’s nickname for Camilla. (Because she did everything for him? Or because she only slept with him on weekends?) When Colborne came back to his office, Diana had disappeared and didn’t come back that day. Later, says a witness to the scene, Adeane told Colborne he had seen Diana leaving the office in tears. “What have you done?” Adeane said to Colborne.

The bracelet issue has entered legend as one of Charles’s most hurtful transgressions, but it could equally be seen as more backlit drama hyped for the Morton tape recorder. Charles was always big on thoughtful presents, as long as they didn’t cost much. He sent out a ton of them to friends of both sexes before he took “la grande plonge,” usually accompanied by one of his voluminous, sensitive notes. What is harder to go along with is the assertion by Jonathan Dimbleby, Charles’s official biographer, that Charles’s insistence on delivering the gift to Camilla in person was an “act of courtesy.”

“Bollocks to that!” shouted Diana when told in 1994 about the gloss Dimbleby had put on the bracelet incident—and what modern woman can disagree with her? But her response also underestimates the bollocks that happened to be the code the Prince of Wales lived by. Charles was about to do the equivalent of taking holy orders, put aside any residual doubts, and, for the sake of the country, marry the girl picked by his parents. He may have viewed the maddening insensitivity of delivering the gift to Camilla himself as a last act of mistress appeasement.

Either way, it was bloody irritating. The sheer momentum with which these events were unfolding meant Diana had no time to process them. “Well, bad luck, ‘Duch,’” Diana’s sister (for sure the salty Sarah) famously said when Diana confided her distress. “Your face is on the tea towels so you’re too late to chicken out.” The effort of trying to understand it all was crushing Diana. Her romantic dream had always had only two people in it: Prince and Princess. Now there was not just a third—Camilla—but a cast of thousands. The intensity of the media participation in her fantasy was giving her heatstroke. In addition to the British press at fever pitch, London was now crawling with international reporters and photographers attempting madly to get up to speed on the baffling irrelevancies of royal detail.

The wedding did for the sales of Tatler, for example, what the O. J. Simpson chase did for the ratings of CNN. It put us on the map. England’s tiny social magazine was suddenly in the middle of the biggest tabloid story in the world. I was hired, along with just about everyone else I knew, by an American network TV show—in my case, NBC’s Today program, as their on-air royalty expert for the week. “Excuse me,” asked one of ABC’s producers at the solemn briefing by the BBC for all media covering the event, “isn’t Lady Diana’s coach a major security risk?” “It’s not all glass and it’s not all driven by mice,” replied the BBC representative with a superior smile. The night before the wedding, a kilo of unbound Lady Diana data exploded through my mailbox. An hour later, it was followed by a voice from the NBC production office on the phone. “The extra tidbits for tomorrow’s show should be with you by midnight,” said the voice. “What tidbits?” “Tidbits,” she repeated, “you know, asking price for Union Jacks in the mall, weight of wedding cake, the movies they’re showing on Britannia on the honeymoon, crowd temperature in the North.”

At Diana’s last public appearance with Charles before the wedding, to watch him wield the royal mallet in a polo match against Spain at Windsor Great Park, 20,000 people showed up at Smith’s lawn to gawk at her. The Daily Mirror’s front-page picture showed Diana pursing her lips and looking tense. “Her face was pale gray as limestone and she hardly smiled,” the Mirror’s John Edwards reported in the kind of play-by-play coverage of her moods usually reserved for World Cup soccer matches: “She ran out of Prince Charles’s open Aston Martin before the car had actually stopped. She went straight to the shelter of the Queen’s private chalet and stayed there twisting a white cardigan in her hands, peeping nervously from behind the door at the crowds and not wanting to join them.” She was pictured rubbing her forehead with both hands. “A few days seemed to have changed her,” Edwards bore on. “Her bounce had gone. The quips stayed buried. She had shed weight and was uneasy with the crush all around her.” It never seemed to occur to Edwards that he and his colleagues were themselves the problem.

Yet what is striking about Diana is how with all these extraordinary pressures she could still appear calm about the things that send other brides over the edge. David and Elizabeth Emanuel were now working on what the press came to call “The Dress” like atomic scientists in a top-secret laboratory. Diana’s choice of the rising husband-and-wife designer team for the bridal gown had been her first act of rebellion. They were young and inexperienced and on no one’s list for a dress this important. Yet in those secretive visits for her fittings, Diana was self-possessed. She always knew exactly what she was looking for down to the diamond-studded horseshoe sewn in the waistband for good luck. “The Dress” was the fulfillment of her Princess fantasy. She was insistent in her demand for its puffy sleeves and floating silk, its twenty-five-foot taffeta train, its nipped waist, and its antique lace embroidered with pearls and sequins. She would be a fairy bride for her father and her Prince. Those creamy ruffles and ivory frills would float her away from the agonies of the present to a future of certain love. By the 1990s, when she was a svelte power woman and girls were marrying in body-hugging tubes, the voluminous crinoline she had worn on July 29, 1981, embarrassed her. It hangs now in its glass case in Althorp like an artifact from Miss Havisham’s attic, Exhibit A in the museum of a dead dream.

The guest list was more problematic for Diana than “The Dress.” All the Hons and Vons of House of Windsor friends and relations had to be invited, leaving little space for the bride’s side. The Queen was so desperate to know what to do with the influx of Germanic freeloaders that she phoned Lady Anson and asked if she’d throw a postwedding party at Claridge’s to get them off her back.

The question of what to do about Barbara Cartland became a national cause célèbre. In the run-up to the big day, Alexander Chancellor, the editor of The Spectator, wrote an editorial in which he called for a special Act of Parliament to ban Raine and her mother from St. Paul’s Cathedral, adding, “For it would be more than a little unfair on everybody if these two absurdly theatrical ladies were permitted to turn a moving national celebration into a pantomime.” Diana was so afraid the pantomime might indeed take place, she pressed for stratagems to blackball Cartland. (The romantic novelist may have spun the dreams that got Diana into St. Paul’s, but the frantic feathered personage who wrote them was too much for her to bear.) Two versions circulate about how the nixing of Cartland was achieved: (a) Cartland was simply struck from the guest list, and (b) Cartland was invited but given a seat behind one of the cathedral’s great pillars. According to one of Prince Charles’s aides, “Barbara was so humiliated she wanted to go abroad for the wedding day, but her sons said that it would make it look as though she had been banished.” To save face, she made the canny move of throwing a party for the Volunteers of St. John Ambulance,^*2 to which she wore the tailored brown uniform of the Order of St. John instead of her usual costume of pink ostrich feathers. (Fifteen years later, the “Queen of Romance” made a succinct judgment on the reasons for the marriage’s failure. “Of course, you know where it all went wrong. She wouldn’t do oral sex.”)

On the eve of the wedding, the royal bride and groom sank awkwardly into canvas director’s chairs for a television interview with the BBC’s Establishment anchorwoman Angela Rippon and ITN’s Andrew Gardner that was broadcast on both channels. The interview, seen today with our awareness of what was to come, is a festival of body language. The couple give the appearance of having been propelled onto the air after arriving from two separate places. The thirty-two-year-old Charles looks young yet seems ancient compared to his childlike fiancée. The crisp, practiced heir to the throne shoots solicitous glances at the almost inaudible Diana, who shrinks deeper and deeper into her director’s chair. She wears a silvery gray young governess dress with a Peter Pan collar, pale tights, and flat gray pumps, a look which at that moment was flooding British High Streets with thousands of Lady Di look-alikes. Charles tells Gardner he hopes marriage will be calming. “Getting interested in too many things and dashing abite, that’s going to be my problem,” he says as if he rather hopes it will be. Asked which presents she’s liked, Diana looks relieved to be on safe terrain at last: “Anything that comes from children, really.”

“Any personal touches for the service?” Rippon tries. Charles fiddles with his sleeve as soon as the word “personal” is uttered. He turns to Diana for help. “Any personal touches?” “Just our friends really,” she replies, but she seems distracted. Her expression is both wary and wistful, as if she half knows already her dream is a thing of the past. Asked to enumerate the interests they share, she gives a list of things they did not: “Music, opera, and outdoor sports including fishing, walking, and”—the activity she hated most in the world—“polo.” Charles truly comes alive only when he talks about the music for the service, which he has planned to the last detail. For the three-and-a-half-minute walk down the aisle, he says he wants something “very stirring, very dramatic and noisy, so ankles can’t be heard creaking.” For his hymn, he says he has chosen the musically sophisticated “Let the Bright Seraphim ” from Handel’s Samson, and that he has flown Kiri Te Kanawa in from New Zealand to sing it. But it is Diana’s choice that everyone remembers. When in her clipped, swallowed, cut-glass accent she says “I Vow to Thee, My Country,” the Anglican hymn that carries the message of patriotic sacrifice of those who died during the First World War, it evokes the image of boarding school girls singing in morning assembly.

“Are you worried?” Rippon asks Diana. “No, I’ll just go along with everyone else,” she replies with a level, veiled, determined stare. Dale Tyron and Camilla Parker Bowles would discover what that meant: over the objections of Prince Charles, Diana banned them from the wedding breakfast. To keep her end up, Lady Tryon invited sixty-five friends and took over half of the fashionable San Lorenzo restaurant. She was quoted in Dempster’s diary as saying: “I was not invited to the Palace and I know Mrs. Parker Bowles wasn’t either…She is also holding a party for friends. Obviously I cannot comment on why I wasn’t invited.”

Stephen Barry, the valet to Charles, alleges that on the night of the prewedding ball at Buckingham Palace, Charles sneaked off for a last tryst with Camilla. The perilous logistics of such a subterfuge make it seem unlikely, even preposterous. Barry himself had written in his memoir, “Buckingham Palace was totally unsuitable for anything secret to take place.” There were 800 guests that night, including Nancy Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and every head still crowned in Europe. The ball was a scene of such sparkle and joy only a priapic clod—which, whatever you think of him, Charles was not—would have jeopardized such a long-planned night of unforgettable national affirmation. Besides, his “boffs” with Camilla rarely took place at Buckingham Palace. It was Mummy’s territory, crawling with spies, and he was as yet far from the point at which he would no longer care if he humiliated Diana. Sally Duchess of Westminster noted to James Lees-Milne that the Prince was absent from the festivities for a time. Her intelligence was that “Charles left his bride for several hours to spend the time with the ‘Goons’ in another room,” Lees-Milne wrote in his diary.^*3 “The pathetic Lady Di was left alone without an escort, to make conversation to people she did not know. This confirms what I have heard from other sources that he is not in love with her.” Is it possible Charles’s mysterious disappearance from the party that night was actually to be entertained by his favorite court jester, Spike Milligan, and Harry Secombe, his fellow “Goon”? He may have been in love with Camilla still, but he was as much in love with the Goons. It would be a wonderful refutation of the conspiracy theory of life if it were not a steamy sexual encounter with his mistress that lured Charles away from the festivities but impersonations of the surreal Ned Seagoon and Major Bloodnok. (For what it’s worth, I would bet on gags over shags.)

Diana did not strike Mary Robertson as the pathetic figure Sally Westminster perceived. There is a palpable vein of envy in all the grander upper-class women toward this snip of a girl who was now garnering so much public adoration. Wedding guest Sir Charles Johnston noted in his diary: “I have never seen such a strong charge of innocently provocative sex.” To Mary Robertson, Diana was at her most ravishing that night in a fuchsia pink taffeta Emanuel gown and a diamond-and-pearl necklace, and danced with all the former Tim Nice-but-Dims from the Coleherne Court days. Rory Scott remembers hitting the floor with Diana in front of PM Margaret Thatcher and embarrassing himself, by constantly stepping on Diana’s toes, ho-ho. Adam Russell has the joyous recall of “everyone horribly drunk and then catching taxis in the early hours—a blur, a glorious, happy blur.” Princess Margaret attached a balloon to her tiara; Prince Andrew tied another to the tails of his dinner jacket. Raine Spencer’s son, William, now the Earl of Dartmouth, said, “You had the feeling that everyone was thrilled to be there, that every guest was exactly where they wanted to be, at the A-list party of the year. I think the last time that an English woman had married an heir to the throne was Anne Hyde to the future James II. It’s funny, because when she was growing up, it was Sarah you noticed, not her.”

Not quite everyone in England was feeling so festive. The run-down area of Toxteth, Liverpool, was still tense after a month of racial street riots. Unrest in areas of unemployment played out like a dark alternative TV show, one that no one wanted to watch. On the wedding eve itself, Prince Charles lit the first of a chain of beacons across the country. After the fireworks, he stood at a window of Buckingham Palace with the ever-attentive Lady Susan Hussey, looking down at the flags and the barricades in the Mall that was already alive with joyful people and ruminating on the momentous change his life was about to undergo. Diana was absent from the fireworks display. She had been returned to bridal purdah in the care of the Queen Mother at Clarence House. Charles sent her a gift—a signet ring engraved with the Prince of Wales feathers and a fond message: “I’m so proud of you and when you come up the aisle I’ll be there at the altar for you tomorrow. Just look ’em in the eye and knock ’em dead.”

When she was at last ushered into Clarence House, Diana was a girl already much changed from that winter night five months before when she had first been given refuge there, as the Queen Mother put it, “under the cloak of night.”

Gone was the country mouse in the air stewardess suit plucked from a Harrods rack. She was now the most famous ingenue of the century, her innocence a commodity of glamour. She dined with her sister Jane in her rooms upstairs while her grandmother, Lady Fermoy, kept the Queen Mother company below. According to Hugo Vickers, the Queen Mother was relieved to be watching the celebratory fireworks on television rather than on the scene with the rest of the family on account of the “proliferation of German royal guests.” The two venerable architects of the wedding enjoyed a victory dinner à deux and watched a rerun of the comedy show Dad’s Army, while upstairs Diana indulged in a bulimic splurge and was, in her own words, “sick as a parrot” after eating everything in sight.

That’s how she described herself ending the evening, anyway, when she talked about it to Andrew Morton eleven years later. The somber recollection denied the lightness of heart that others saw in her that night. The Queen Mother’s elderly page William (Backstairs Billy) Tallon had a memorable encounter with her before she went to bed. When Clarence House was largely silent, Diana wandered downstairs in search of company. She seemed at such a loose end that Tallon invited her into his office for a chat with himself and an equerry. He remembers he asked her, “Well, so shall we all have a drink?” And the equerry “poured me a stiff one, and an orange juice for Lady Diana and she was very happy. Then she saw my bicycle standing against a wall and she got on it and started to ride round and round, ringing the bell and singing ‘I’m going to marry the Prince of Wales tomorrow.’ Ring, ring. ‘I’m going to marry the Prince of Wales tomorrow!’ Ring, ring! I can hear that bicycle ringing now. She was just a child you know, just a little girl.”

Diana’s dream was reaching its crescendo. The wedding day’s magic was so powerful that a mad, unreasonable joy coursed through the nation. The symptoms of royal fever as noted by Tatler included extreme pulsations of patriotism at the sound of choral music, tears welling up involuntarily in eyes, shivers up spines, and intense envy of the bride and groom. The splendor and hopefulness of it all offered a vision of England that turned every hack into a troubadour, every Roundhead into a cavalier. Even Princess Anne was transformed on the big day from gumbooted grouch to radiant Gibson girl, complete with four-string pearl choker, drop earrings, and froufrou chapeau. Diana said later that she felt like a “lamb to the slaughter” when she rose that morning, but as “The Dress” was lowered onto her now-skinny frame at Clarence House she burst into a joyous sing-along of “Just One Cornetto,” a TV commercial for ice cream to the tune of “O Sole Mio,” with her dressers and bridesmaids joining in.

“The Dress,” anticipation of which had now reached fever pitch, provoked a moment of national anxiety. When the fairy Princess alighted from the glass coach at St. Paul’s, it was suddenly obvious that the inexperienced Emanuels had miscalculated. They had failed to see that the eighteenth-century coach would be too small for a train that large, especially when crammed in beside the heavy figure of Earl Spencer. The first glimpse made it look like a bundle of old washing until the two designers leapt forward and unfurled it like a billowing, creamy flag.

Diana later said that as she advanced up the aisle on her proud father’s arm she caught sight of Camilla (who, along with Dale Tryon, had at least made it into the service) “wearing a pale grey, veiled pill-box hat, her son Tom standing on a chair.” But I suspect that the look Diana shot in her direction was not to confirm her trepidation, as she claimed, but to register her triumph. Camilla was a mere mortal on that day, forced to watch the man she loved disappear behind a curtain of ceremony with a shining, nubile young Princess. There should be little doubt who felt the winner at that moment. In truth, Diana, ever the carer, was more focused on her father’s difficult journey up the aisle. Fear that he might pass out at any minute aroused considerably greater anxiety among his family than was apparent on television, causing his son-in-law, Robert Fellowes, to keep leaning worriedly forward. The Earl supported himself so heavily against Diana that father and daughter gently tacked and weaved as they advanced toward the waiting Prince.

When Diana lifted the demure cascade of the white veil to say her vows, the rustle inside the majestic church fell silent. The great and the good craned forward to listen. They heard the bride make a mistake, addressing Charles Philip Arthur George as Philip Charles Arthur George, but in her it was considered an adorable lapse. Even the sardonic Australian TV critic and essayist Clive James called it in the Observer a “blunderette that completed the enslavement of her future people by revealing that she shared their capacity to make a small balls-up on a big occasion.” Diana would have us believe that, as she left behind the pealing bells of St. Paul’s on the arm of the Prince, she was thinking that while everyone was happy because they thought that she and her bridegroom were happy, her own mind was darkened by a “big question mark.” Perhaps so. But I return to the image of her at Clarence House the night before, riding around and around on the borrowed bicycle, ringing the bell, and singing like a jubilant schoolgirl, “I’m going to marry the Prince of Wales tomorrow!”