‘We must get the boys out and away from the television,’ said the Queen as she clicked across the mournful images of the princess being run on every channel. ‘We must get the radios out of their rooms … Let’s get them both up in the hills.’
Diana’s death was a tragedy, but here they were together as a family, away from the crowds and the media in the rugged peace of the Highland landscape where Elizabeth could apply her own favoured therapy in times of trouble – lots of exercise and fresh air. Peter Phillips, Princess Anne’s bluff rugby-playing son, took William and Harry out with him on the moors each morning, jollying them along with stalking and the odd fishing expedition – plus lots of mucking around on the brothers’ noisy all-terrain motorbikes.
The Duke of Edinburgh took over every evening, gathering the boys and the family round the bulky, wheeled barbecue wagon that was his pride and joy. With its grilling rack and pots and pans stowed neat and shipshape, the wagon would be towed to the shooting lodge selected for that evening’s supper. No staff were present and Prince Philip served as chef. Cooking and carving and cleaning up afterwards, the shared rituals of the self-help meal kept the boys busy and made them feel useful. William seemed to be taking it bravely – then apparently he cracked.
‘Our worry at the moment is William,’ Prince Philip cut in suddenly, interrupting one of the morning funeral arrangement conference calls to London that involved the palace, Downing Street and the Metropolitan Police. ‘He’s run away up the hill and we can’t find him. That’s the only thing we are concerned with at the moment.’
Philip had been no fan of Diana, but he was immensely fond of her elder son. He had taught William to shoot, spending hours with him out on the moors and displaying in these days a warm and pastoral care for both his grandsons.
‘I can remember, and it sends a tingle up my back thinking about it,’ recalled Anji Hunter, Tony Blair’s advisor on the conference calls. ‘We were talking and then from the speaker phone on the table came Prince Philip’s voice, and it was anguished: “These are the boys here. We are talking about these boys – they have lost their mum.” It brought it all home to us.’
With William found, Charles walked his sons round the grounds briefing them on the details of the funeral – which he had insisted should take place in Westminster Abbey. At one early stage both the Queen and Charles Spencer had argued for a small, private affair, but after just a day it had become clear that nothing less than the grandeur of a full-scale service and procession through the streets would do, with the coffin being sent out to start its journey at Kensington Palace in order to accommodate the crowds.
‘Is mummy really dead?’ Harry, still not quite thirteen, had asked during the service in the local church which, on the Queen’s instructions, had gone ahead that first Sunday morning without any mention being made of Diana or the fatal crash that had happened just hours earlier.
The two boys’ nanny Alexandra ‘Tiggy’ Legge-Bourke proved a crucial support in these dark days – she was effectively a substitute mother. Charles had hired Tiggy (nicknamed after Beatrix Potter’s motherly hedgehog Mrs Tiggy-Winkle) to play precisely this role after the 1992 separation – to Diana’s fury. She did not need to find a surrogate ‘father’ to help with the boys, she had argued derisively – glossing over, perhaps, how she might have felt if Charles had delegated an active stepmothering role to Camilla.
‘She was part servant, part sister and part mother,’ recalls one royal aide, trying to describe the nanny’s special role. She was Diana without the difficult bits.
‘I give them what they need – fresh air, a rifle and a horse,’ said Tiggy. ‘She [Diana] gives them a tennis racket and a bucket of popcorn at the movies.’
To Diana’s chagrin, it was Tiggy who William had invited to bring a picnic and keep him company in place of his parents at Eton’s Fourth of June celebrations in 1996, following Diana’s embarrassing ‘I loved him’ disclosures on Panorama. But the nanny was a professional. She had made sure that mother and son healed their rift over the months ahead, and now her ‘jolly hockey sticks’ approach at Balmoral was just what the situation needed.
The Queen herself could have done with some ‘jolly hockey sticks’ in her dealings with her nation in the days following the death of Diana. Elizabeth II’s wish to shield her grandsons from the pain of their mother’s death was a worthy reason for taking refuge in the Highlands in the earliest days of September 1997. But her withdrawal also reflected her disinclination to rate the disappearance of the trouble-making princess as any great loss to the monarchy.
September 1997: Britain mourns Diana
The Queen and her husband viewed the epidemic of bouquet-laying as a national nervous breakdown, and Elizabeth II had no intention of getting involved. She would not make any speech of tribute to Diana, nor spend any more time in London than she had to. The Royal Train could take the family down through Friday night for the Saturday funeral, then bring them straight back again afterwards.
‘How can we coop the boys up in a gloomy old palace all covered with dustsheets?’ asked Prince Philip.
It all came to a head over the flagpole. While Union flags around the country – including those over Windsor Castle and Balmoral itself – were flying at half-mast to mourn the death of Diana, Buckingham Palace itself remained conspicuously bare of any sign of mourning. People understood why the Royal Standard,
