‘Eighty per cent of the boys at Eton have stepmothers,’ ran the gist of his reported explanation to one friend. His estimate sounds a huge and exaggerated assemblage of stepmothers to be concentrated at any one school or college, but the point remained – why shouldn’t the prince move ahead to meet up with the new woman in his father’s life?
Out at Highgrove William had tried following the hunt on one occasion when he suspected that Camilla was riding with the Beaufort. He had chased after the riders on his beloved quad bike, but his quarry proved elusive. In the months following Diana’s death, Mrs PB – whose horse was now kept and cared for at Prince Charles’s stables – was officially ‘vanished’ from public view. Camilla became a non-person, and whenever she dared venture out with her hunting friends, her hardhat was pulled down low over her forehead.
Then in the spring and summer of 1998 the lady resumed her visits to St James’s Palace – and William made his move. One Friday afternoon in June, just a week or so before his sixteenth birthday, school ended early and the prince headed up from Eton to meet some friends in London – phoning his father with feigned casualness to say that he would be dropping in for a change of clothes.
Panic at the palace! As Camilla subsequently related, her first instinct was to bolt when Charles told her that Wills was on the way. But she powdered her nose, put on a brave face and smilingly bobbed William a curtsy.
Oh, the miracles that can be accomplished over an old-fashioned cup of tea! It was William who led the conversation, Camilla recalled, trying to put her at ease with Gloucestershire talk of horses, the hunt and polo. How was Tom (her son who was also Charles’s godson) getting along since leaving Oxford?
After half an hour of the professional chit-chat in which the prince was already quite practised, the ever-composed teenager made his excuses and left for the movies. William appeared quite unruffled by the encounter – but the momentous meeting had left Camilla, by her own account, ‘trembling like a leaf’.
‘I really need a gin and tonic,’ she said – and promptly poured herself a double.
Harry proved yet more relaxed about his meeting with the wicked stepmother. It was over tea again – this time at Highgrove a month or so later in the company of Tom and Laura Parker Bowles, Camilla’s two slightly older children, at twenty-three and twenty, with whom William and Harry had already spent some time the previous Easter.
Camilla would report that Diana’s younger son had looked at her ‘suspiciously’. But, as with William, the encounter seems to have piqued her own anxieties more than it did the laidback juvenile.
‘Whatever makes you happy, Papa,’ was the standard response of both Diana’s boys to Charles’s efforts to construct a new family circle around his now ever more present companion. The brothers did not feign great enthusiasm, but they expressed no hostility either.
In this summer of 1998 Harry was basking in his recent success at Common Entrance, and as he got ready for Eton his father told him that he wished to broach ‘an important conversation’. The time had come, Charles felt, to tackle the unpleasantly rumbling ‘Hewitt Question’. Harry’s new, more grown-up friends at the school might tease him, the prince worried, about the story of Diana’s long relationship with ‘Uncle James’ – which Harry obviously knew about – along with the rumours that the red-headed Captain Hewitt was Harry’s ‘real’ father.
January 1999: Prince Charles and Camilla photographed together in public for the first time as a couple
We do not know whether this unsettling suggestion of Harry’s paternity had come the thirteen-year-old’s way by this date – we get the story of this highly intimate encounter from Angela Levin, who interviewed Prince Harry in 2017. According to Levin, Charles’s concern was to reassure his son ‘that without doubt he and not Hewitt was his father’ – and presumably Charles emphasised how the calendar made the rumour quite impossible, since Hewitt had not met Diana until two years after Harry’s birth.
‘Harry listened carefully,’ according to Levin, who sources this story to ‘someone who wants to remain anonymous’. But the prince ‘didn’t say a word either while his father was talking, or when he had finished’.
This was hardly surprising. What words could any of us conjure up if one of our parents suddenly presented us with the practical details of such an intimate topic? The young teenager’s silence could well have reflected Harry’s frequent problem during these years – being confronted with an issue that was simply too grown up for him. But Harry may also have been wondering why, just at the moment when his father was attempting to reconcile his son to his longstanding mistress – the source of such family pain and distress – he should choose to bring up the subject of Diana’s infidelity.
Prince William’s career at St Andrews University could scarcely have got off to a worse start – and he had his family to thank for that. The massed cameras were all waiting on 24 September 2001, to see the nineteen-year-old prince arrive in the Scottish seaside town to commence his history of art studies, in a state of some anxiety.
‘I think he was really nervous when he arrived,’ recalls Colleen Harris, Charles’s press secretary, the first black senior official to be employed by any of Britain’s royal households. ‘All the press were there – cameras from all over the world – and it suddenly hit him. He was very unsteady for a little while after that. He’d had a fantastic “gap year”, going anywhere on the globe that he’d wanted and suddenly he was stuck here in this corner of Scotland, not knowing anybody, just one or two guys from Eton whom he
