saying sotto voce: that Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, was “vulgar, vulgar, vulgar” and that Charles and Diana would “likely divorce,” an outcome that would “clear the air” and would not prevent Charles from someday becoming king.
The retired courtier also put the Queen in perspective, describing her as a realist “far more than you would imagine.” He said she was determined to “sit it out,” knowing that the monarchy goes through “phases.” When asked about the comments several months later, the Queen Mother assured her friend Woodrow Wyatt that she and the rest of the family weren’t cross with Charteris in the least. “He’s got such a lot of wisdom,” she said.
Elizabeth II had “one of the outstanding experiences of my life” in March 1995 when she stepped foot on South African soil for the first time in nearly five decades. She was greeted as “Elizabeth” by Nelson Mandela, her host for a state visit. (He and Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia were the only world leaders to call her by her Christian name, without causing offense.) She had initially met him in 1991 during a conference of Commonwealth heads of government in Zimbabwe. As leader of the ANC, Mandela had been invited only as an observer, and South Africa still remained outside the Commonwealth. Lacking head of government status, he technically couldn’t be included in the Queen’s traditional banquet. But Robert Fellowes urged the Queen to make an exception. “Let’s have him,” she responded instantly. At the time, her decision was potentially controversial; just four years earlier Margaret Thatcher had branded Mandela a terrorist.
In April 1994, he was elected president of South Africa in the country’s first democratic election open to all races. The Commonwealth welcomed the former rogue nation as a member soon afterward, and the Queen attended a special service in Westminster Abbey to mark the occasion that July. Her South Africa visit eight months later attracted large and enthusiastic crowds, notably in the black townships where people held up signs saying, “THANK YOU FOR COMING BACK.” It was “a huge emotional charge for everybody,” said Douglas Hurd.
Elizabeth II was less reassured about her standing in her own country, where she continued to be overshadowed by Diana’s exploits—news reports about the princess’s telephone stalking of Oliver Hoare, a book detailing her affair with James Hewitt, derided by the tabloid press as the “love rat,” the Andrew Morton sequel that included gruesome specifics of Diana’s self-mutilation, and headline-grabbing accounts of what she characterized as her “re-launched” life as a global charity worker—less than a year after her vow to retire.
With the approach of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe on May 8, 1995, the Queen was uncharacteristically hesitant about what to do. “She was nervous about the fact that the monarchy was not doing well in the public’s esteem,” recalled Robert Salisbury, the Tory leader in the House of Lords who was in charge of organizing the celebration. “I wanted to reproduce the crowds at Buckingham Palace. She was afraid they would not turn out, so she wanted to have it in the Horse Guards Parade, where crowds would be smaller. I said, ‘No, I can fill it.’ I was extremely nervous. If I had called it wrong I would have felt an awful idiot.”
The crowds ended up even larger than they had been in 1945. Looking across the sea of people from the balcony with her sister and ninety-four-year-old mother—the very trio who had stood in the same spot with King George VI fifty years earlier—she wore the stony-faced expression she used to suppress strong feelings. “The Queen’s eyes were brimming,” said one of her ladies-in-waiting. “But she was absolutely determined that nobody should see when they got back inside. She quickly took a large gin and tonic and knocked it back.”
AS WAS SO often the case in those years, the benefits of the touching royal tableau were only temporary. On November 14—quite intentionally, the forty-seventh birthday of Prince Charles—Diana informed officials at Buckingham Palace that she would be appearing shortly on the BBC’s respected public affairs program
The program aired on November 20, the forty-eighth wedding anniversary of Elizabeth II and Philip. It was Diana’s ultimate revenge against her estranged husband. No longer shielded by an intermediary, she had been furnished the questions in advance and had rehearsed the answers. Barbara Walters, who later talked to Diana about the interview, called it a “superb performance.” The princess spoke unflinchingly about her emotional torment, her romance with Hewitt, and her shattered marriage, and she portrayed the royal family as insensitive to her problems, preferring to dismiss her as “unstable.”
She reserved her most withering fire for Charles, whose fitness for the throne she undermined by saying he would find the role of king “suffocating.” The “top job,” she said, “would bring enormous limitations to him, and I don’t know whether he could adapt to that.” As for his affair with Camilla, Diana memorably said, “There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.” She conveniently ignored the fact that during the time referred to—from 1986 onward—there were in fact four in the marriage, including James Hewitt. The other line that resonated with the fifteen million TV viewers in Britain and millions more overseas was her wish to be “a queen of people’s hearts.”
Her close friend Rosa Monckton later wrote that the performance was “Diana at her worst.” Charles’s friend Nicholas Soames said the interview showed “advanced stages of paranoia.” The damage, both self-inflicted and to the royal family, was far greater than that caused by the Morton book, although a Gallup survey registered an initial positive response for the princess, with 77 percent saying she had a right to present her side of the story. More worrying for the Queen, 46 percent of respondents believed Charles was unfit to be king, an increase of 13 percent in two years. Over lunch in Mayfair, Martin Charteris told Woodrow Wyatt that Diana was “very dangerous” as well as “unbalanced,” and that a divorce was now “inescapable.”
The Queen did not watch Diana’s interview. Charles Anson, her press secretary, made it clear to the media on her authority that she “never watched
The biggest controversy over the divorce had nothing to do with money or child custody or perquisites, but with Diana’s title. In a meeting with the Queen at Buckingham Palace on February 15, 1996, attended by deputy private secretary Robin Janvrin, who took notes, Diana volunteered to give up “Her Royal Highness.” Elizabeth II remained predictably noncommittal, but she urged Diana to sit down with Charles for a detailed discussion of all the issues. Afterward, Diana told Paul Burrell that her mother-in-law had shown her “sensitivity and kindness.”
When Charles and Diana finally met at St. James’s Palace on February 28, Diana agreed to a divorce. They would share the upbringing of their two sons, and she would be known simply as Diana, Princess of Wales, relinquishing “Her Royal Highness.” But Diana again overreached by immediately revealing the confidential details of the discussion to the press, along with her own particularly damaging spin (transmitted to her ally at the
As Charles and Diana’s complicated negotiations proceeded, Andrew and Fergie’s divorce became final on May 30, a decade after their wedding. Along the lines of Diana’s agreement, Fergie gave up “Her Royal Highness” and was called Sarah, Duchess of York. But unlike the Waleses, the Yorks parted amicably despite Fergie’s frequent misbehavior. In bringing up their daughters, they described themselves as “co-parents,” and Fergie said they were in fact the “happiest unmarried couple.”
Charles’s generous divorce settlement for Diana was disclosed that summer: a ?17 million lump sum along with more than ?385,000 annually for Diana’s office expenses. She would live and work out of Kensington Palace, and Charles would do the same at St. James’s Palace. She would conduct her charity activities separately from the royal family, but she would need to secure permission from the Queen as well as the Foreign Office for any overseas travel in the line of work. The state apartments at St. James’s Palace would be available to her for entertaining, and she could use royal transport for her official engagements. Diana tried at the last minute to hang on to her “HRH,” but she finally yielded when fourteen-year-old William told her it didn’t matter to him. To bolster
