Diana referred obliquely to the issue of her two sons’ ‘different temperaments’ in an interview that year. ‘Harry is quieter and just watches,’ she said. ‘No. 2 skates in quite nicely. But the bad luck about being No. 1 is trial and error, so we’re open-minded about William.’
No. 1 and No. 2 … Here was the heart of the problem. Charles and Diana had never hidden from William his future destiny as king – and by being sent to Mrs Mynors’ Nursery he had been perversely reminded of this when he was only three. The idea had been that by mixing with ‘ordinary’ children, the young prince should become more ordinary himself, but the opposite seemed to occur. Everyone from staff to dinner ladies – and not least the other children – knew exactly who William was, and had treated him accordingly, even though they had been told to do otherwise.
When is the right moment to tell an infant that he is destined to be king? Prince Charles had found out at no particular age. ‘It’s something that dawns on you with the most ghastly inexorable sense,’ he said on his twenty-first birthday.
More recently, Prince William and his wife Kate have decided that they would not broach the ‘king’ subject with their firstborn Prince George until a controlled moment of their choice – reflecting William’s unhappiness at the haphazard fashion in which the whole business of his royal destiny had buzzed around his head from the start.
‘Royal firstborns may get all the glory,’ said Diana in one interview, ‘but second-borns enjoy more freedom. Only when Harry is a lot older will he realise how lucky he is not to have been the eldest.’
She made a careful point, with Charles’s full agreement, that the two boys should be photographed together as equals as much as possible – and then she gave interviews talking non-stop about the difference between the heir and the spare.
Out of this mess, however, and after the missteps of his early years, Prince William came to locate positive strength in the knowledge of his weird and formidable destiny. As the rows between his parents intensified; as he wept and shouted at his father; as he found himself taking his mother’s side – pushing paper tissues under her bathroom door on one occasion because he could hear her sobbing inside; as he tried to make sense of why the two parents whom he loved no longer loved each other, William came to find consolation in the idea that he would one day be ‘king’.
He also found strength in that idea. Many little boys fantasise more or less consciously about brandishing the unimaginable powers of a super wizard or a pirate chief. Well, William really was going to be a king and when that day came, he would be able to exercise the authority that he could already observe his grandmother and father enjoying.
This observation seems to have given the young prince the strength he needed to endure the pain and confusion that any child would feel as his family crumbled around him – the fantasy became William’s remedy. ‘To young children,’ wrote Dr Spock in 1985, ‘the world consists of the family which to them is mainly father and mother. To suggest breaking up the family is like suggesting the end of the world.’
By the autumn of 1988, the six-year-old William, dressed in a grey and red uniform and cap, was entering his second full year at the Wetherby Pre-Preparatory School in Notting Hill, and people noticed a new cautiousness about the young prince – a greater sense of control and certainly less elbowing entitlement, with no more complaints about him barging to the head of the dinner line.
The year before, when William had started at Wetherby, was the time when Prince Charles himself had admitted that his marriage had ‘irretrievably broken down’ and that he had resumed his full-scale intimacy with Camilla. Highgrove housekeeper Wendy Berry got used to seeing Mrs Parker Bowles’s car coming up the drive on a Sunday evening soon after Diana had left for London with the boys – and Diana herself was pursuing the same pattern. By 1988 she had started her five-year love affair with Guards officer James Hewitt, who was giving her riding lessons – as well as the boys. The marital deadness observed by James Whitaker on the summer holiday deck of the Fortuna had become the reality of the Waleses’ everyday London–Highgrove family life.
As the elder brother, William’s response to all this had been to grow up very quickly. An intelligent boy, earning good grades at Wetherby, he had begun applying that intelligence to his own life. The trauma of his parents’ marriage had matured him early, forcing him to abandon the egotism of infancy and to develop a precocious sense of duty that he applied to his love and support for his distressed mother – but which would also play a role in his vision of himself as a future monarch.
Duty – service to others – is the essence of ‘rex iustus’, the just and virtuous king. ‘Good King Wenceslas’ (AD 911–935) was considered a saint because he went out in the freezing snow around Prague on the Feast of Stephen, the festive day following Christmas Day, when everyone else at court was feasting, in order to help a poor man who was gathering winter fuel.
The once-rambunctious William was becoming more reflective. As he prepared to leave home behind for the challenges of boarding school in the autumn of 1990, the formerly swaggering eight-year-old was a noticeably quiet character – definitely introverted. But considering his family crisis and the future destiny that he now took so seriously, the young prince had a lot to be introverted about.
Prince Harry, meanwhile, was moving in quite the opposite direction. Ken Wharfe, bodyguard to Diana
