In recent months – even as this book was being written – we saw the younger of the pair finding himself a new identity and seeking to follow, with his wife, a new way ahead. In Shakespearean terms, Prince Harry has decided to throw off his old and troubled past – the dissolute world of Falstaff and Prince Hal – to remake himself in the fresh and shining role of King Henry V, British history’s heroic and exemplary monarch: ‘Oh, happy band! Oh, band of brothers …’
The trouble is that brother William has claimed that job already.
3
Dynastic Marriage
‘Marriage is a much more important business than falling in love …’
(Prince Charles, 1979)
So you are approaching the age of thirty. You are a single male of the species – reasonably attractive if rather shy, and not very sexy. You are heir to the throne of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland – plus Canada, Australia, New Zealand and a dozen or so other Commonwealth monarchies – and you have your love life to organise.
No, sorry, you have a future queen to locate for this formidable array of thrones.
Is there a difference?
Well, yes, there is, actually – and that dilemma provides the basis of the story that is at the heart of this book. Princes William and Harry were the products of an arranged dynastic alliance, not a love match …
As the future King Charles III responded to the nudgings of his family in the late 1970s to get on with the business of tracking down a lifetime companion, the Prince of Wales found himself on the horns of a dilemma – to which his great-uncle and ‘honorary grandfather’, Lord Mountbatten, had a solution that he would reiterate with relish:
‘I believe, in a case like yours,’ wrote Mountbatten to Charles on Valentine’s Day, 1974, ‘that a man should sow his wild oats and have as many affairs as he can before settling down. But for a wife he should choose a suitable, attractive, and sweet-charactered girl before she has met anyone else she might fall for.’
It was a measure of Charles’s shyness that he did not tell his interfering ‘Uncle Dickie’ to stuff his cynical advice where the monkey puts his nuts, since his ‘honorary grandfather’ was not only peddling the values of a vanished age, he was also pushing the candidacy of his own granddaughter, Amanda Knatchbull, just sixteen, as the ‘suitable, attractive, and sweet-charactered girl’ whom Charles should eventually select as his future queen – thus bringing even more Mountbatten blood into the dynasty of Windsor.
Nine years his junior, Amanda knew the prince well, and in time she would come genuinely to love Charles, in her grandfather’s opinion. But as a teenager she was clearly too young to commit to marriage – so the old man’s worldly counsel was offered in the hope that his great-nephew would ‘keep’ himself for Amanda.
‘I am sure,’ Charles responded a few weeks later, ‘that she must know that I am very fond of her …’
In the event, Charles’s and Mountbatten’s imaginative ambitions for Amanda Knatchbull – discussed in her total absence and ignorance – came to naught. Over the years the two cousins did grow close, developing a mutual respect and friendship that has lasted to the present day. But when the prince finally made his proposal in the summer of 1979 – shortly before Lord Mountbatten’s assassination by the IRA – the independent-minded Amanda politely turned him down.
‘The surrender of self to a system,’ she explained, was so absolute when joining the royal family, it involved a loss of independence ‘far greater than matrimony usually invites’.
These powerful if formal words come to us via the memory of Prince Charles, as he recounted the details of his rejection to his biographer Jonathan Dimbleby. The prince could recall every reason Amanda had given him for her refusal – and especially ‘the exposure to publicity, an intrusion more pervasive than attends any other public figure except at the zenith of a chosen career’.
‘Her response,’ concluded Dimbleby, ‘served only to confirm his own belief that to marry into the House of Windsor was a sacrifice that no-one should be expected to make.’
The future king would clearly have to find himself another suitable and sweet-charactered girl. But in the meantime, Charles had enjoyed several years of success pursuing Uncle Dickie’s alternative line of advice on the sowing of wild oats, since he had made the acquaintance of a certain Camilla Parker Bowles (née Shand), a characterful lady noted for her sheer brass nerve. Long before her royal future was assured, Mrs Parker Bowles had taken her young children, Laura and Tom, shopping to Sainsbury’s in the Wiltshire market town of Chippenham.
‘Most of the parking spaces were filled,’ recalled Laura, ‘but Mummy saw an empty one right outside the front door and nipped in there. The parking space was “Reserved for the Mayor of Chippenham”.’
When the family came out with their shopping bags, a man stopped Camilla and asked her what she was doing in the mayor’s parking place.
‘Mummy smiled and said, “I’m so sorry, I’m the Mayor’s wife …” and hurried me into the car. The man followed us and said, “What a joy to meet you for the first time – I’m the Mayor!”’
The story gives credence to the scarcely believable tale of how Camilla is often said to have first introduced herself to Charles, sometime in the early 1970s. It was a pouring wet afternoon and the prince, aged twenty-two, was just stroking one of his ponies after a polo match on Smith’s Lawn in Windsor Great Park, when Camilla Shand, then twenty-four, approached for a chat – without any introduction.
‘That’s a fine animal, sir,’ she said. ‘I’m Camilla Shand.’
‘I’m so pleased to meet you,’ replied Charles politely –
