was a poor student, twice failing all of her O-level exams. After an unhappy six weeks at a Swiss finishing school, Diana returned to England in 1978, and a year later took a job as an assistant at the Young England Kindergarten in London.
When Prince Charles finished his five years in the Royal Navy at the end of 1976, the tabloid press dedicated itself to chronicling his romantic pursuits, a campaign that intensified in November 1978 when he turned thirty, the benchmark he had set three years earlier as “a good age for a man to get married.” One of his passing fancies was Sarah Spencer, but Diana caught his eye during a pheasant shoot at Althorp, the thirteen-thousand-acre estate in Northamptonshire that Johnnie Spencer inherited when his father died in 1975. Charles was twelve years older, but Diana at age sixteen shamelessly flirted with her sister’s beau and developed a full-fledged crush on the heir to the throne. Over the next several years their paths crossed periodically, but it wasn’t until July 1980, when they were guests at a house party in Sussex, that their romance began. Diana was alluringly pretty, with big and expressive blue eyes and a becoming blush to her cheeks, an “easy and open manner,” and an apparent love of the country life Charles cherished. He was particularly moved by her compassion over his loss of Dickie Mountbatten the previous year.
A fast-paced courtship followed, with invitations to the Cowes races and Balmoral, where Diana had visited twice previously to stay with her sister Jane, who had married the Queen’s adviser Robert Fellowes in 1978. But this time she was a guest of Elizabeth II, and when a tabloid reporter spotted the “perfect English rose,”
Meanwhile the tabloids and paparazzi pursued Diana so relentlessly that in January 1981 Philip wrote his son a letter saying that he would damage her reputation unless he either proposed or quietly cut off the relationship. In his role as paterfamilias, Philip was presumably also expressing his wife’s opinion, but she did not directly comment on Diana’s fitness to be wife of the heir to the throne. After returning from a ski holiday, thirty-one-year-old Charles proposed to nineteen-year-old Diana at Windsor Castle on February 6, and the engagement was announced on February 24.
Charles would later say that his father’s letter had wounded him and subjected him to undue pressure. “Prince Philip and the Queen felt responsible for Diana, particularly since Johnnie had been an equerry,” said Pamela Hicks. “Prince Philip wrote a very helpful letter, but Prince Charles read it differently. He saw it as saying he must make a sacrifice now, and make up his mind. He kept the letter on him and would bring it out and read it.”
In Charles’s headlong rush into marriage to a young woman who satisfied the prevailing requirements of noble birth and virginal innocence, he and his parents focused on Diana’s appealing traits—her charisma and humor, her warmth, her shy and winsome manner, her seemingly biddable nature. They knew that her parents had been divorced but they reckoned that she would welcome being part of the royal family. They also thought that since she had grown up in proximity to royal life, she would take to its demands effortlessly—a leap of faith, as it turned out. “There is a difference between being neighbors and being married and living in a palace, going to garden parties and banquets, knowing who the people are and what you say to them,” said one of Diana’s school friends in Norfolk.
If the royal family had taken the time to probe Diana’s friends and relatives, they would have come across elements of Diana’s character and background that would have given them pause: nagging insecurities that had been intensified by a troubled childhood, lack of discipline, shifting moods, signs of obsessive behavior, and difficulty telling the truth. Of these Ruth Fermoy was well aware, but as she later explained to Charles’s biographer Jonathan Dimbleby, she felt unable to voice her misgivings. “If I’d said to him, ‘You’re making a very great mistake,’ ” she said, “he probably wouldn’t have paid the slightest attention because he was being driven.”
ON JUNE 13, only weeks before her eldest son’s marriage, the Queen led her birthday parade up the Mall on Burmese, a nineteen-year-old black mare that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had given her in 1969. Every day for the previous two weeks she had practiced her sidesaddle technique in the Royal Mews at Buckingham Palace, and early that June morning she had taken her favorite mount for a canter around the Palace gardens.
Riding on Burmese for the thirteenth time amid the cheering crowds on the Mall, she was dressed in the scarlet tunic of the Welsh Guards and her navy blue riding skirt. Her posture perfectly erect, she faced squarely ahead in the saddle, with both legs on the left side of Burmese as she held the reins lightly in her left hand and a crop in her right. She rode in front of Charles and Philip, in their red tunics and bearskins, as well as several members of the Household Cavalry.
Shortly before 11 A.M., as she turned right toward Horse Guards Parade for the start of Trooping the Colour, six shots rang out from the crowd. The Queen’s startled horse cantered forward, and she instinctively pulled the reins with both hands, focusing completely on settling him. Her husband and son watched as guardsmen and onlookers immediately tackled the man with the gun, policemen streaked across the parade route to assist, and one of the cavalrymen spurred his horse and cantered to the Queen’s side. She proceeded calmly at a walk, leaned down to pat Burmese with her left hand, smiled at the crowd, and continued with the ceremony. The shots were blanks, and the gunman, seventeen-year-old Marcus Sarjeant, was sentenced to five years in prison for “intent to alarm” the sovereign. The Queen later told friends and family that in a split-second glance she had seen Sarjeant in the crowd pointing the gun but couldn’t believe her eyes.
The Queen’s reaction was not only an impressive display of expert horsemanship, but the first time the public had witnessed so vividly the unflinching physical courage and equilibrium that friends and courtiers had seen privately: standing quietly while surrounded by “dive bombing” colts, or sitting calmly when a ball crashed into an adjacent chair at a cricket match and everyone else jumped to their feet. “I never saw her scared in any way,” recalled Sir Edward Ford, her assistant private secretary for fifteen years, even when a madman dropped a rock on her car during one of her early visits to Belfast and “she drove on as if nothing had happened.”
Elizabeth II always understood the risks of appearing on horseback or in an open carriage, and she refused to accept protection that would intrude on her ability to be seen by the public. Her fatalistic attitude about the possibility of assassination was reinforced by the reassuring knowledge that an orderly succession was in place. Nevertheless, in 1982 the army instituted new procedures requiring two members of the household to flank the Queen in her birthday parade. “You know why you’re there,” she cheerily announced to Malcolm Ross as he took position beside her one year. “You’re the one to get shot, not me.” Periodically as they rode down the Mall, she would look over and say, in the manner of a strict riding instructor, “Left leg straight! Left leg straight!” The Queen continued to ride until 1986, when Burmese had to retire at age twenty-four. Rather than train a new mount, she switched to her horse-drawn Ivory Phaeton.
The press and public praised the Queen’s handling of the shooting. “In every pub and club throughout the land the verdict is the same,” wrote the
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ONE OF THE prominent guests at the wedding festivities was Nancy Reagan. The first lady had met Charles years earlier through Walter Annenberg, Nixon’s envoy to Britain, and his wife, Lee, during a visit to California while the prince was serving in the Royal Navy. Nancy Reagan also endeared herself to the royal family by treating Charles to dinner in the private quarters of the White House the previous May, with a collection of guests that included Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, William F. Buckley, and Diana Vreeland. “I have fallen in love with Mrs. Reagan,” Charles told Mary Henderson, wife of British ambassador Nicholas Henderson. “I wanted to kiss her!”
While the Queen couldn’t entertain the new first lady herself, busy as she was with wedding preparations, she arranged for her cousin Jean Wills to host a luncheon in her honor on Tuesday, July 28, followed by coffee with the Queen Mother at Royal Lodge and a polo match at Smith’s Lawn. Nancy Reagan and Josephine Louis, the wife of John Louis, the newly appointed ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, dressed “in our best bib and tucker,” as Josephine Louis recalled. “We were probably overdressed for polo.” They were also surrounded by swarms of security that had been stepped up after an assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan the previous March.
The match was already under way when a Land Rover appeared, and out popped the Queen from the driver’s
