Following the death of Diana in 1997, people remarked on how well the two princes William and Harry reacted to the unjust and unexpected removal of a mother figure from their lives – surprised, bewildered and tragically distraught though they were. Ten years earlier, they had had a little practice.
9
Entitlement
‘To a certain respect, we will never be normal …’
(Prince William, June 2007)
After the birth of Prince Harry in September 1984, Diana and Charles moved into separate bedrooms – and stayed there. The much-celebrated dynastic alliance of 1981, the future of the British monarchy, had lasted less than four years in the same marital bed. There were occasional happy flurries when the freeze thawed, particularly on working trips abroad when their hosts allocated them joint quarters. But this ended in February 1987 on the Waleses’ tour of Portugal.
Diana had clapped her hands with delight in Lisbon’s Queluz Palace when she was shown her bed, a romantic four-hundred-year-old four-poster that, as she later told one of her staff, was ‘made to be shared’ – until she realised that her husband had been shown to a separate room. It was the result, she was told, of a request that had come ‘via’ Buckingham Palace.
Diana would both bemoan and joke about the bedroom boycott with her girlfriends. Perhaps she should try to get Charles drunk one evening, she suggested, in the hope of encouraging a bit of princely ‘leg-over’. Oh no, they would respond, you know what happens to the vital organ under the influence of too much alcohol – brewer’s droop!
‘How about turning down the lights and wearing a blonde wig?’ asked one of them. ‘That way he might mistake you for Camilla!’
Diana roared with laughter. After time and some rueful reflection, she had come to accept the reality of her husband’s ‘lady’ in his life. Her coping strategy – in these early stages, at least – was to address the new vision that she was developing of her princessly role, and to concentrate on her sons and the responsibility she felt to care for them as a new kind of hands-on royal mother. As Diana’s life went awry with her husband, she put her focus more directly on William and Harry. Her two boys were the future – whatever mess she and Charles might make of the present.
Early in the 1990s Prince Charles commissioned an authorised version of his first forty years by the distinguished broadcaster and journalist Jonathan Dimbleby, who was granted special access to close friends and members of the family, including Prince Philip. Dimbleby was given sight of Charles’s personal letters, along with long hours of interviews with the prince himself. Published in the midst of raging controversy about the state of the Waleses’ marriage, the object of the exercise was to rehabilitate Charles as both heir and husband.
In this latter respect the book sought to portray the prince as a man who had been totally ‘loyal to his wife and faithful to his marriage vows’. Dimbleby claimed that Charles had had no improper contact with Camilla Parker Bowles during his first five years with Diana, turning to Camilla only when he ‘reached the point of desperation’ in the belief that his marriage had ‘irretrievably broken down’. This was sometime late in 1986, noted Dimbleby. Until then, he wrote, Charles and Camilla ‘had not talked to each other at all … She had been wholly excluded from his life.’
Well, this was ‘apart from the one occasion before the wedding, when he gave her the “farewell” bracelet,’ wrote Dimbleby, and yes, admittedly, ‘he had seen her fleetingly at occasional social gatherings’. Then there had been ‘a few telephone conversations’ during the engagement, and then ‘one after his marriage (when he rang to report that the princess was pregnant with William) …’
‘Methinks,’ as Shakespeare’s Queen Gertrude remarked to Hamlet, the gentleman ‘doth protest too much’ – and most outside experts agree. Of the ‘top twelve’ distinguished writers or teams of writers who have examined the details of Charles and Diana’s marriage in the early 1980s, only three unequivocally support Charles’s claim of solid, five-year fidelity. And one of those is Dimbleby. So that leaves nine not believing that Camilla was ‘wholly excluded from his life’.*
What did Prince Charles say at the time of his engagement to Diana? – ‘Whatever “in love” means’?
And what did Diana overhear her husband say to Camilla on the phone in his bath? ‘Whatever happens, I will always love you.’
Perhaps the truth can be found in the meaning and the message of those two very different ‘whatevers’ … Or in that conversation about the cufflinks with the intertwined Cs that Charles chose to wear on his honeymoon.
‘Camilla gave you those, didn’t she?’ Diana asked.
‘So what’s wrong?’ responded Charles. ‘They’re a present from a friend.’
This is where we go back to Jonathan Dimbleby for what is certainly the emotional truth. ‘In Camilla Parker Bowles,’ wrote Dimbleby, ‘the Prince found the warmth, the understanding and the steadiness for which he had always longed and had never been able to find with any other person.’ (Italics added.)
Charles did not love his wife, in other words, in the way that he truly loved his mistress. Maritally his mind and his heart had always been unfaithful.
And what about that ‘wholly excluded’ lady? According to Stuart Higgins, a royal correspondent in the 1980s and later editor of the Sun, Camilla Parker Bowles provided him with regular off-the-record briefings about the state of the royal marriage from 1982 to 1992.
‘I talked to her once a week for
