Though Charles had been invited, he sent his regrets on the grounds of ‘duty’, since he was representing his mother in Nassau, where the Bahamas were about to celebrate independence. But no one who knew the story believed him. The prince had locked himself in his cabin on Minerva on first hearing the news of the engagement, writing forlornly in a confidential letter, ‘I suppose the feeling of emptiness will pass eventually.’
It took some time, but his sad feeling did pass – to some degree. By the mid-1970s the prince had begun dating again, enjoying the company of quite a number of eligible young women.
So had Andrew Parker Bowles. The galloping major had not waited that long after his 1973 wedding to resume his skirt-chasing ways, and his wife tolerated his philandering as she had done before their marriage. Enjoying domestic life in the country, Camilla concentrated on the raising of her two children, Tom (b.1974) and Laura (b.1978). She also maintained her friendly contact with Prince Charles, who had agreed to be the godfather of Tom.
Then, in August 1979, Lord Mountbatten was assassinated with members of his family by an IRA bomb on board his fishing boat off the coast of Mullaghmore, County Sligo. Charles was devastated and in his sorrow he turned to Camilla. He regarded her as his best friend – the person, above all, in whom he could totally confide. His former lover remained his ‘touchstone’ and ‘sounding board’, as he put it to Jonathan Dimbleby. From Camilla’s point of view, her once-casual ‘revenge bonk’ over Andrew and Anne had become deeply serious.
Speaking mainly, and at length, on the telephone, Charles poured out his heart to Camilla, and she gave him the solace that only she could provide. In a matter of months their best friendship had turned again into love – certainly in the spiritual sense. There were some who believed that in 1979 and 1980 the pair secretly resumed a clandestine affair, and one or two members of the royal family were so concerned that they warned the prince directly of the damage his persistent ‘illicit liaison’ would do to the reputation of the monarchy. A feeling was growing that Charles, approaching the age of thirty-two, should be getting on with the job of finding himself a future queen – and that very summer of 1980 he was photographed at Balmoral in the company of Lady Diana Spencer.
Still only nineteen years old in September that year when she was caught in fishing mode with Prince Charles on the banks of the River Dee by a Fleet Street lens, Lady Diana Spencer had known the prince for some time already. Her elder sister Sarah had actually dated him for a spell in Silver Jubilee year (1977), while her maternal grandmother Ruth, Lady Fermoy, was a confidante of the Queen Mother and one of her ladies-in-waiting.
The Queen had invited Diana to Balmoral so that she and her husband could take a closer look at the young woman whom insiders were even then tipping as her future daughter-in-law. In the 1960s Diana had been one of the children who came to play with Andrew and Edward at Sandringham – happening to fall between the two younger brothers in age, and joining them to watch Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on the comfy sofas of the house’s ‘cinema’. Notably demure and polite in those days, how had the girl developed?
Diana passed the test with flying colours.
‘We went stalking together,’ remembered fellow guest Patti Palmer-Tomkinson. ‘We got hot, we got tired, she fell into a bog, she got covered in mud, laughed her head off, got puce in the face, her hair glued to her forehead because it was pouring with rain … She was a sort of wonderful English schoolgirl who was game for anything.’
Both the Queen and Prince Philip eyed Diana approvingly. Edward and Andrew competed to sit beside her at evening picnics, and the whole family liked her. Just a year after the death of his beloved honorary grandfather, Charles felt he had finally located ‘the sweet-charactered girl’ for whom Uncle Dickie had urged him to search – and the British press felt the same. Media around the entire world went so ‘Di-crazy’, in fact, that Charles’s father became alarmed. As the press coverage intensified, Prince Philip told his son in a blunt intervention that Charles must either propose to the girl or walk away ‘immediately’ for the sake of her good name.
‘Whichever choice he decided to make,’ Charles later recalled his father counselling, ‘he should not delay.’
That is how marriages get ‘arranged’ in the age of mass media scrutiny. Charles bowed to his father’s ‘advice’ and proposed to Diana at the beginning of February 1981. The couple announced their engagement at the end of the month, and Britain became even more hysterical in the weeks leading up to their spectacular union on 29 July. Over six hundred thousand people packed the pavements to cheer the couple to and from the wedding in St Paul’s Cathedral, in front of an invited congregation of 3,500 and an estimated 750 million global viewers – then the largest TV audience in history.
The bride’s intricate ivory taffeta gown was paired with a lace veil no less than 153 yards long, together with an eighteenth-century heirloom tiara, while her silk bridal slippers were embroidered with 542 sequins and 132 matching pearls – the heels kept deliberately low so as not to upstage the groom: at five foot ten, Diana was exactly the same height as Charles.
When it came to the couple’s wedding vows, Diana was the first bride in royal history to promise to love, honour and cherish her husband but not necessarily to ‘obey’.
4
Agape
‘Put the needs of others above your own fears.’
(Meghan Markle, Graduation Speech at Immaculate Heart School, 3 June 2020)
On 4 August 1981, less than a week – just six days – after the wedding
