Anne would certainly have been the one senior member of the royal family who was on the same wavelength as Harry as his disaffection with ‘royalness’ developed – and that disaffection was to grow so strong that he would take his own son across the Atlantic in order to escape the same fate. Would it have made any difference to this outcome if the prince had been under the godmotherly guidance of the ‘Great Stroppy One’ who successfully raised her own children, Peter and Zara, without titles and as non-royals?
Anne did manage to keep both of them living, for the most part, in Great Britain.
8
Bringing Up Babies
‘She was our guardian, friend and protector … Quite simply the best mother in the world.’
(Prince Harry, 31 August 2007)
‘I think it’s time we had one of those …’
Prince Charles was in London in the early 1980s on a ‘walkabout’, and as the prince said ‘one of those’, he was pointing down at the little daughter of the man in front of him. Charles had been delighted with Diana for producing a sturdy male heir within less than a year of marriage. Now he wanted a daughter to match, hoping to recreate the congenial brother–sister dynamic that he had always enjoyed with his own sister Anne.
Outside observers have tended to miss this – the closeness of Charles to his sister, deriving from her feisty companionship in a sometimes bleak childhood that was not over-supplied with fun. Anne’s challenging tomboy-to-brother camaraderie contributed toughness to the havering-wavering Charles, rather as his father Philip’s decisive personality helped keep the cautious Queen on her toes.
When the prince had picked out Highgrove in Gloucestershire as his prospective family home before his marriage, people spotted that it was only fourteen miles from Camilla at Bolehyde Manor. But they failed to note that it was even closer to Anne’s home at Gatcombe Park, which was just seven miles down the road. Charles and Anne were more of a team than people realised.
Diana respected this, and as her second pregnancy developed in the spring of 1984, she was by no means averse to the prospect of a daughter.
‘She really didn’t mind what she had,’ recalls one of her girlfriends. ‘And, yes, she did quite fancy having a little girl.’
But the hospital scans had told Diana otherwise. The photographs showed clearly that she was bearing another healthy son, and it was the measure of the princess’s youth (twenty-three that July), her emotional inexperience and her distance from her much older husband (thirty-six that November) that she did not tell Charles straight away what the doctors had said.
These happened to be warm and rather close months in the Waleses’ marriage – ‘the closest,’ the princess told Andrew Morton, ‘we’ve ever, ever been’ – and Diana was clearly scared of spoiling that. She did not want to disappoint her husband.
But the truth was the inescapable truth – and it was not her fault in any way. What was the sense of not confiding in Charles and putting off his disappointment so that the problem would linger instead, lying in wait to surprise and sour what should have been the marvellous moment of birth? For surprise and sourness were certainly what happened inside the Lindo Wing on 15 September 1984 – in spades.
Diana later related her husband’s horror at baby Harry’s appearance.
‘First comment was, “Oh God, it’s a boy!”
‘Second comment, “And he’s even got red hair!”’
By which the disappointed father presumably meant that the new arrival was not a nice, civilised Windsor, but an ’orrible sh*t-stirring Spencer along the lines of Diana’s prickly (and red-haired) brother Charles.
‘Diana told me that she just burst into tears,’ recounts one of her confidantes. ‘Instead of saying “What a sweet baby!” he did not praise her or thank her at all. He just sulked.’
In the photos of the couple leaving hospital with their new son, Charles does not even pretend to smile, and three months later at Harry’s christening in December 1984, the frustrated father was still hanging on to his resentment, which he actually voiced to Frances, Diana’s mother: ‘I’m so disappointed,’ complained the thwarted prince, ‘I thought it would be a girl.’
The new baby’s grandmother responded by snapping at her son-in-law’s thoughtlessness. ‘You should be thankful,’ she retorted, ‘that you had a child that was normal.’
‘Ever since that day,’ Diana said, ‘the shutters have come down … That’s what he does when he gets somebody answering back at him … It just went bang, our marriage – the whole thing went down the drain.’
By the end of 1984 Diana was also shutting him out. Someone had told her that Charles ‘had gone back to his lady … Something inside me closed off.’
Despite the alarmingly premature erosion of their marriage, Charles and Diana worked very hard at being good parents. It was the one thing on which they totally agreed. Individually and as a couple, they wanted happiness for their sons.
Both father and mother had studied the childcare books. By the early 1980s Dr Benjamin Spock reigned supreme on both sides of the Atlantic with his emphasis on child-centred rearing.
‘Every baby needs to be smiled at, talked to, played with, fondled, gently and lovingly – just as much as he needs vitamins and calories,’ Spock had written in his bestselling Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. ‘And the baby who doesn’t get any loving will grow up cold and unresponsive.’
Prince Charles was a Spock-sceptic, disdaining what he regarded as ‘these new-fangled ideas about parenthood’. But Diana felt quite the opposite. She even claimed some distant blood relationship with the famous educator, and St Mary’s Lindo Wing boasted a few mini-Spocks of its own. The doctors went to some trouble to arrange with the royal couple
