But the boys’ father was still spending much of his time organising his private letters and delivering self-justifying interviews to Jonathan Dimbleby for his heavyweight blast-back at Diana’s collaboration with Andrew Morton. A 620-page tit-for-tat, The Prince of Wales: A Biography was also intended to redeem the damage done to the prince’s reputation by ‘Camillagate’.
Charles’s first broadside came in a TV interview with Dimbleby in the summer of 1994, when the prince admitted to his relationship with Camilla. Immediately afterwards, Diana went down to Ludgrove to talk to the boys.
‘William asked me what had been going on, and could I answer his questions?’ she later recalled. ‘Which I did.’
Was their father’s love affair with Camilla the reason why the marriage had broken up? William asked his mother. To which Diana responded with the phrase that she would make famous on television.
‘I said, “Well, there were three of us in this marriage and the pressures of the media was another factor, so the two together were very difficult. But although I still loved Papa, I couldn’t live under the same roof with him.”’
Asked on a later occasion what effect she thought this explanation had had on her elder son, she replied, ‘Well, he’s a child that’s a deep thinker, and we don’t know for a few years how it’s gone in. But I put it in gently without resentment or any anger.’
When the Dimbleby biography was published that autumn, William asked his mother directly about the hurtful message of the headlines – that Charles had never really loved Diana and had been pushed into marrying her by Prince Philip for essentially dynastic reasons.
‘Is it true?’ asked the twelve-year-old in manifest distress. ‘Is it true that Daddy never loved you?’
Harry was also present as his brother posed the question. It was as if the two boys had already been discussing the issue, and Diana later described how the enquiry and the anguish on her sons’ faces as they waited for her answer ‘pierced my heart like a dagger. I just wanted to cry.’
But she kept her composure for the sake of her boys – delivering the best response she could manage with an ‘answer answerless’ that hardly brought much consolation.
‘When we first got married,’ she told them, ‘we loved each other as much as we love you today.’
The two princes’ unhappiness at their father’s self-justifying biography, however, was as nothing compared to their fury at the publication on 3 October 1994, two weeks earlier, of another book – Princess in Love by Anna Pasternak – the syrupy and sensational account of their mother’s five-year love affair with Guards officer Captain James Hewitt between 1986 and 1991.
Handsome and brave, with an authentic war record to his credit (Gulf War tank commander, Kuwait, 1991, mentioned in despatches), the devil-may-care Hewitt had captivated William and Harry as he had entranced their mother when he started giving her riding lessons in the summer of 1986. The boys had spent long hours on horseback with the captain improving their riding technique, then following him inside the cavalry barracks to experience the thrill of mingling with real-life soldiers in uniform, their horses stamping and whinnying in the stalls.
Hewitt had had his regimental tailor run up genuine khaki uniforms for the two princes, complete with small boots and Guards insignia, teaching them how to march and salute and carry a rifle. It is no exaggeration to suggest that the excitement the two brothers experienced in their time with Captain Hewitt helped to inspire the specific army element in the careers that they would both undertake.
‘I’m going to be a soldier when I grow up,’ Harry was once heard to declare while clambering into the turret of a tank – and when the time came, the prince joined the Guards, just like Hewitt.
They called him ‘Uncle James’ and drove down with him and Diana quite regularly to stay in Devon for breaks with his approachable and natural mother Shirley, who ran a riding school. Playing the good guests, the boys would help Diana carry out the dishes after lunch and do the washing up. It made a change from their habitually grand weekend country house destinations – and it was the closest, before their college and military years, that the two boys ever came to the fabled texture of ‘ordinary’, non-royal family life.
Now, in October 1994, William and Harry discovered from Princess in Love, the contents of which were splashed over every newspaper for days, that Uncle James had made love to their mother in a Highgrove lavatory while they were on the other side of the door. Hewitt was responding, wrote Pasternak, to a ‘cry for help’ from Diana, ‘like the ghostly cry of a wounded animal … Later she lay in his arms and wept.’
On publication, Princess in Love’s first printing of 75,000 copies had sold out in the shops by lunchtime. So not for the first time, William and Harry were confronted by embarrassing intimacies about their mother in the company of the rest of Britain – with an unpleasant extra twist for Harry. Hewitt’s square features and ginger-ish red hair prompted a rumour that has dogged the prince to the present day: that the gallant captain, Uncle James, must be his father, since Harry is the only red-head in the royal family.
The suggestion was and is quite impossible. Harry was born in September 1984, meaning that he was conceived around Christmas 1983 (when his brother William was eighteen months old). Diana would not meet James Hewitt for another two and a half years – until the summer of 1986 when Harry was sitting solidly on the back of a pony.
