Here Diana’s coffin, draped in a Spencer – not a royal – standard, was interred on the afternoon of Saturday 6 September, attended by just her family and a few others in the aftermath of her funeral in Westminster Abbey. William and Harry had come north on the Royal Train with their father Charles and Uncle Charles – an awkward, strained journey after Earl Spencer’s provocative verbal fireworks in the abbey.
The boys planted oak trees in their mother’s memory and have since been back to plant more over the years, bringing wives and children as they came along, as well as pots of forget-me-nots, said to have been Diana’s favourite flower. On one wall of the temple there is a plaque displaying an extract from her brother’s famous abbey speech, giving thanks for ‘the extraordinary and irreplaceable Diana, whose beauty both internal and external will never be extinguished from our minds’.
Beside it is a second plaque, bearing the words that Diana herself had uttered in June 1997, just weeks before her death: ‘Nothing brings me more happiness than trying to help the most vulnerable people in society. It is a goal and an essential part of my life – a kind of destiny. Whoever is in distress can call on me. I will come running wherever they are.’
These were ambitious words to live up to, and Diana had meant them for just herself. But here, carved into marble, to confront her sons whenever they visited her grave, they blazed out as intimidating challenges to two motherless boys.
William regained his equilibrium pretty quickly. The grand old Duke of Wellington said that he had triumphed at the Battle of Waterloo thanks to all his games of cricket on the playing fields of Eton. Well, Prince William of Wales got back on his royal track by playing football and all manner of games on those same green and muddy acres – while looking up towards the castle on the hill that would one day be his, as the future King William V. The prospect of future kingship might discombobulate his neurotic father, but for William it served as a source of strength again in these days of sorrow.
Every few Sundays or so William would still do his weekend walk down Eton High Street and across the bridge into Windsor, then up the hill for lunch, or sometimes tea, with his Windsor grandparents in the dark-panelled Oak Room. Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip performed more healing and effective parenting with their bereaved grandson in those Sunday sessions in the late 1990s than ever they achieved with any of their own children. After lunch the Duke of Edinburgh would execute his discreet post-prandial vanishing act, leaving the sovereign to share her heart and secrets with her teenage protégé.
Did Her Majesty encourage her grandson to say his prayers in these days of difficulty? The Queen is known to kneel every day beside her bed, just as surely as her daughter-in-law Meghan bows her head in Agape meditation with each dawn. Elizabeth II is a dedicated Christian who would regularly invite the American evangelist Dr Billy Graham to lunch with her when he brought one of his crusades to Britain. Theologically the Queen had more in common with the fundamentalist preacher-man than with many of her archbishops of Canterbury, and she surely prayed for the spirits of both her sorrowing grandsons. We do not know – we shall probably never know – the content of her Sunday heart-to-hearts with the teenage William. But she did influence the boy – subtly.
‘It’s very much the case that she won’t necessarily force advice on you,’ William revealed a dozen years later, talking to the Queen’s 2011 biographer Robert Hardman. ‘She’ll let you work it out for yourself. She’s always there for a question or two – for whatever it is you might need. But, just as she probably had to, she feels that you have to work it out for yourself, that there are no set rules. You have to make it work. You have to do what you think is right.’
This grandmotherly challenge helped steer Prince William through his remaining years at Eton. He noted how the Queen had had ‘to carve her own way’, so he was not scared to do the same. It gave the young man a moral compass and a purpose. William was popular with his school mates, developed steady friendships that have lasted to the present day, and garnered twelve GCSEs – with A grades in English, history and languages. When it came to his A-levels he knocked out an A, a B and a C – hardly stellar grades, but quite respectable.
William had decided early that he did not, in fact, want to go to Oxford or Cambridge like his father and Uncle Edward, who had both sneaked in with undistinguished exam results. Diana had planted a healthy anti-elitist instinct in both her boys. So William opted for St Andrews, the Scottish Oxbridge a dozen miles south of Dundee on the east coast of Scotland – where he would soon meet the young Ms Middleton who had so happily opted for the same academic destination.
From Eton to Kate! Give or take the odd gap year, plus a session in the military, that just about covers the story of one young prince’s early life. The progress of William’s younger brother, however, did not prove so smooth …
Prince Harry’s unhappiness in the months following the death of his mother was compounded by an especially skewering humiliation when he returned to school. He was held back for a year. The prince had not measured up to his Common Entrance exam requirements, so while his friends skipped off to Eton, Harrow and their other public schools, Harry, thirteen on 15 September 1997, was stuck at Ludgrove having to repeat his studies
