People are not supposed to clap at funerals, but this congregation put their hands together wholeheartedly – and eyewitnesses remember Diana’s two sons both joining in with the applause. Elizabeth II and her husband, however, did not clap.
The clapping in the abbey on that day was an acknowledgement of many things – of Diana’s warmth and human impulses, of her many good works and, above all, of people’s recognition that she was fallible. The princess was no saint, and in so many respects she had been an imperfect human being.
But all of Diana’s many failings were transcended by her glamour – her sheer glittering magic which embodied the ancient idea of the ‘royal touch’ that could miraculously heal people of their ailments and diseases. This was the semi-sacred essence of the ‘People’s Princess’ – that Diana walked the earth as a royal divinity in the tradition of Good Queen Bess, Agincourt’s King Henry V or even a right royal monster like King Henry VIII. Those idols had had the royal touch, just as surely as the sad and agonised Charles Mountbatten-Windsor did not.
‘I’d like to be a queen of people’s hearts ...’ Princess Diana to Martin Bashir, Panorama, November 1995
That was Diana’s towering legacy to her two sons in September 1997 – and it was also her challenge to them. Could her boys soar as their mother had soared? To this day, William and Harry clearly provide discomfort to Buckingham Palace. The two generate the same mildly extra-terrestrial excitement with which their mother always discomforted the royals themselves and their retainers.
The princes’ grandmother the Queen can handle them firmly and astutely – but she and her husband are just about the only people who can. The courtiers of BP, KP and SJP today are certainly at a loss. And William and Harry themselves have so far managed to exercise the same magic over the outside world – at least so long as they have stayed together and have not sought to break up the healing and magical legacy of Diana.
14
Scallywag
‘The problem with my brother is that he wants to be me.’
(Charles, Prince of Wales, February 2019)
Here’s a question for your next family COVID lockdown quiz – which of the following pranks was played on Queen Elizabeth II by her son Prince Andrew (Mountbatten-Windsor child No. 3, son No. 2 and ‘spare’ to ‘heir’ Prince Charles for twenty-two years from his birth in 1960 until the arrival of Prince William in 1982)?
1. Putting itching powder in her bed?
2. Creeping up behind a Buckingham Palace sentry box while his mother was in residence and tying the sentry’s shoe laces together?
3. Climbing onto the roof of the palace and manoeuvring the TV aerial to block its reception so that the Queen could not watch her favourite horse race from Sandown Park?
You will be an extremely popular person when you reveal the correct answer – all three! Nobody loses when it comes to identifying the latest act of folly from the monarch’s second son …
But let us be fair to Prince Andrew, Duke of York – the helicopter pilot who dodged the Exocet missiles and risked his life in action during the Falklands War in the summer of 1982. His bravery fully entitled Andrew to come home the conquering hero and to clench a rose between his teeth – a princely and endearingly piratical gesture, indeed. Then the pirate captain shone again when Windsor Castle caught fire in 1992. Both Philip and Charles were away, and Andrew’s shouting out of orders was just what the emergency demanded. His imperious manner has been ridiculed as being very ‘Toad of Toad Hall’, but in November 1992 Mr Toad’s bossiness helped save the Hall.
For many years Prince Andrew was celebrated as the royal family’s scallywag – and after 1986 when he married Sarah Ferguson, ‘Fergie’, the two of them did much to brighten the Windsors’ darkening image through some difficult years. It was only later, on his foreign trade missions, that the prince’s dubious choice of business contacts came to shadow his reputation. As one Foreign Office official put it, ‘Prince Andrew never met an oligarch that he didn’t like.’
Elder brother Charles, however, had never been totally ‘sold’ on his younger sibling. Some said he was jealous of the chance that Andrew had had to display his heroism in action in the Falklands – and then there was that devilish and unavoidable ‘edge’ that is inherent in the dynastic dimension. In royal families, the heir can never help wondering whether his ‘spare’ is not secretly feeling that ‘he wants to be me’.
The ‘Way Ahead’ group was set up in the aftermath of 1992’s disasters to examine what had gone wrong in the ‘annus horribilis’ and to come up with reforms for the future – in addition, of course, to improving the fire precautions at Windsor Castle. First assembled by the Queen’s confidant and Lord Chamberlain, David Airlie, this informal council of top royals – Elizabeth herself, Philip and all four children, but not yet William and Harry – met a couple of times a year, and its agenda for the summer of 1996 made intriguing reading.
Somehow a Guardian journalist had got hold of the plans (and rather approved of them): the idea of giving female royals the same rights of succession as males; abolishing the ban on heirs to the throne marrying Catholics; reforms to royal finances and the payment of taxes; the ending of the monarch’s role as Supreme Governor of the Church of England; and a drastic reduction in the style, size and public identity of the entire royal family.
This was Prince Charles’s special crusade. In an age of slimming, the future monarch wanted to slim down the House of Windsor. Charles’s idea was to reduce the
