Considering that the Queen was in her mid-seventies when her mother died, the degree of control imposed by the Queen Mother was striking. The contrast between that royal way and Diana’s could not have been more extreme. Although both Lilibet and Princess Margaret were very much their own women privately, the elder sister was by nature reserved though a fearsome mimic, while also being a wit and fun loving, though the younger was decidedly more outgoing and unorthodox, more outrageous and even more fun loving, but all within the confines of disciplined royal behaviour.
Despite their fun-loving natures, neither sister ever stretched royal boundaries when bringing their children up. All six of them - Prince Charles, Princess Anne, Prince Andrew, Prince Edward, Lord Linley and Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones - were reared in keeping with ancient royal and aristocratic traditions. They were well behaved children who grew into well-mannered, well-disciplined and traditionally behaved royals and aristocrats. This meant that when they were in public, they conducted themselves as they were expected to behave, and not as they themselves wished, even though, in the privacy of their own homes, their standards might slacken.
This was certainly not true of Diana’s children. Both boys were allowed to ‘run wild’, to quote Princess Margaret. By the time Diana and Charles’s firstborn, William, was three, Elizabeth II was bemoaning how undisciplined he was. In 1986, when he was a page at his Uncle Andrew’s wedding to Sarah Ferguson, he endeared himself to the public, though not to his own family, by fidgeting, sticking his tongue out, and generally behaving like the naughty four year old he was. Harry, at a year old, was still too young for anyone to know if he would follow in his brother’s footsteps, but the harbingers, which would turn out to be only too accurate, were not good. Diana encouraged indiscipline, and wildness is what she got.
Up to that point, there had only been one wild royal child that anyone could think of in the British Royal Family. That had been the Queen’s late uncle John, the epileptic and (judging from his behaviour) autistic youngest son of the late King George V and Queen Mary. Uncontrollable, his father used to say that he was the only person whom he could never get to obey him. The unruly but tragic John had died at the age of thirteen of an epileptic fit in 1919, two months after the end of the First World War. Although his parents had loved him, there was an almost audible sigh of relief that nature had come to the rescue, for there was every indication that John would have become a major embarrassment to the monarchy had he lived to adulthood.
Whether William and Harry would follow on the path of Great-Great Uncle John remained to be seen, but the question of how the boys should be disciplined was not straightforward owing to the family dynamics. Charles was Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother’s favourite grandchild. As far as she was concerned, he could do no wrong. If he wanted to turn a blind eye to the way his children were being reared, she did not feel it was up to her to interfere. Moreover, she understood Charles’s predicament. She sympathised with his powerlessness as a father and husband in the face of a wife as powerfully driven as Diana.
The Queen Mother’s insights into Diana’s mode of behaviour came not only from what she knew through her own family, but through Diana’s as well. One of the Queen Mother’s Women of the Bedchamber was Diana’s grandmother Ruth, Lady Fermoy, who violently disapproved of Diana’s conduct, to such an extent that by the time of her death in 1993, she was no longer speaking to her granddaughter. Lady Fermoy regarded Diana as treacherous, dangerous, and irresponsible. She felt that she had been an appalling Princess of Wales, had undermined the monarchy, was a bad daughter and granddaughter, had been anything but a good wife, and moreover was proving to be a dangerously lax mother.
On the other hand, Diana thought that her own family and the Royal Family were out of touch with the mores of the time. She felt that they all needed to loosen up a bit, to be less preoccupied with good behaviour and become more in touch with their feelings. Not for her the stiff upper lip. Whether she was happy or sad, she made sure everyone knew about it. She felt it was important to be in touch with one’s feelings, and to show them, rather than concealing them behind a facade of good behaviour.
In many ways, Diana’s values were more in keeping with her times than either the family into which she had been born or married. She was determined that her children would not grow up straightjacketed by decorum the way royal and to a lesser extent aristocratic children used to be. The royals especially had always been isolated from everyday life and indeed from the equalising ebb and flow of ordinary friendship. Even in Charles’s generation, all British royals expected their closest friends, and often their lower-ranking cousins, to refer to them as Sir and Ma’am instead of by their Christian names. All Charles’s girlfriends were obliged to call him Sir, and the Queen Mother’s brother, Sir David Bowes-Lyon, had to address her as Ma’am even when entertaining her at his home, St. Paul’s Walden Bury, although the only other person present was his good friend and neighbour Burnett Pavitt. It was this level of formality which Diana rightly sought to change. Having lived in a less restrictive world, she was determined that her children would have upbringings that allowed them to relate to people on a human level, devoid of the crippling restrictions royal formality imposed upon royals. They were to be referred to by employees as Wills or William and Harry, not Your Royal Highness
