Game of Crowns: Elizabeth, Camilla, Kate, and the Throne (11 page)

Willingly, even eagerly casting herself in the role of royal mistress, Camilla had already proven herself adept at maneuvering courtiers, courtesans, and even members of the Royal Family like so many pieces on a chessboard. Everyone was right where she wanted them—or so Camilla believed. “Diana moved into Kensington Palace like she was supposed to,” Elsa Bowker recalled, “and they told her to do what they said, what the Queen wanted.”

Diana had other plans. “They thought of me as a blank slate,” Diana told Lady Bowker, “and they didn’t expect someone like me could possibly have a mind of her own. They were wrong.”

“YOU’RE CRYING WOLF,” CHARLES SHOUTED
as he stormed through the main hall and out the front door of Sandringham in his riding clothes. “I’m not going to listen. You’re always doing this to me.” His wife of two years, now three months pregnant with their first child, stood on the second-floor landing and was vowing to throw herself down the main staircase. “I am so desperate, Charles,” she pleaded. “Please listen to me!”

Over the years, Diana’s unhappiness over Charles’s affair with Camilla would drive her to slash her wrists with a razor, stab herself in the chest with a pocketknife, and hurl herself against a glass display case, cutting herself badly in the process. This, however, was arguably the most spectacular—and dangerous—action she had ever taken to get her husband’s attention.

The Queen and Princess Margaret were on the main floor, overhearing everything as the bitter quarrel that started in the couple’s upstairs rooms spilled into Sandringham’s entrance hall. A blood-chilling scream, followed by the sound of a tumbling body, and the Queen came running to find her daughter-in-law in a heap at the foot of the stairs.

The Queen was, Diana later said, “absolutely horrified. She was so frightened.” Before any footmen arrived, Princess Margaret comforted Diana while the Queen, trembling, called for medical help. Incredibly, Charles just kept right on walking—out the front door and twelve minutes down the road to the stables of the Royal Stud. He would eventually learn that, although the bruises on Diana’s lower abdomen were of concern to her gynecologist, tests showed the fetus had not been harmed.

To the outside world, all appeared well in Camelot. A blue-eyed, seven-pound, one-and-a-half-ounce heir was born at 9:03 p.m. on June 21—an induced labor timed not to interfere with the Prince’s polo schedule—and the world rejoiced at the arrival of the future king. No one was more pleased than the Queen, who could breathe easier now that—regardless of her son’s dogged refusal to give up Camilla—the future of the monarchy was assured.

Unlike his own father, who had been playing squash with an equerry when Charles was born, the Prince of Wales was at his wife’s side throughout the delivery. At the moment their son was born, Charles whispered to his wife, “Fantastic, beautiful. You are a darling.”

Yet there was still little they could agree on, including the name of their first child. She preferred the trendy Oliver or Sebastian.
He wanted to call their newborn Arthur or Albert (after Queen Victoria’s husband). After a week, they settled on William Arthur Philip Louis Windsor.

Diana was surprised at how easily her stiff, obstinate, even cruelly detached husband took to fatherhood. Although neither he nor Diana ever contemplated changing a diaper—that task was strictly the responsibility of no-nonsense nanny Barbara Barnes—he often volunteered to give Baby William his bottle and rock him to sleep.

Not that the new family dynamic made him a more caring spouse. When asked what he gave Diana for her twenty-first birthday on July l—just ten days after giving birth—Charles replied curtly, “Some flowers and a hug.”

The undeniable joys of motherhood notwithstanding, Diana continued to battle chronic depression and bulimia—and not entirely because of her husband’s infidelity. By this time, Diana was the most photographed, imitated, celebrated, admired woman in the world. She was both an avatar of fashion and a courageous humanitarian whose personal touch—Diana was the first to dispel unfounded fears about the disease by embracing AIDS patients, for example—made her the “People’s Princess.”

If Diana was unquestionably the glistening jewel in the Windsor crown—the one person who had breathed new life into the monarchy—the Queen’s Men in Gray never let her know it. In fact, Diana’s every move was monitored, her every action strictly controlled. She could count on stinging rebukes from the Palace virtually every day—negative comments on what she did, said, or wore that were classified under the general heading of “constructive criticism.”

Some of the fault-finding came directly from Elizabeth. Diana
told her bodyguard, Ken Wharfe, that at one point the Queen demanded that she drop AIDS from her list of personal crusades. “Why don’t you,” she asked her daughter-in-law, “get involved in something a little more pleasant.”

The Princess of Wales, still vexed by feelings of worthlessness rooted in her childhood, took it all very personally. “I think Diana was very angry and annoyed that the Queen could not see what she was doing,” Wharfe said. “Diana felt a member of the Royal Family should be involved with campaigns to find a cure for AIDS.”

“All I want is one ‘Well done,’ that’s all,” Diana said. None was forthcoming. To cope, she turned to spiritual advisors, psychic healers, astrologers, and psychiatrists who prescribed large doses of Valium. Nothing worked. One friend, Lord Palumbo, witnessed the “crying, sobbing, wailing for two or three hours until her black mood had run its course.” Then she would charm and delight a crowd at some public event “as if there had been no darkness at all.”

Despite the strains caused by his continued devotion to Camilla, Charles longed for a daughter, and toward that end was intent on resuming what he called the royal couple’s “breeding program.” When Diana told Charles about the second pregnancy, it struck her as odd that he took it in stride. They had sex sporadically if at all during this period. “Diana told me chances for intimacy were limited. I took her to mean nonexistent,” said Lady Bowker. Diana could only say, provocatively, that the blessed event was occurring “as if by a miracle.”

Blocked by Camilla from forging an emotional connection with her own husband, Diana took lovers of her own. One, Captain James Hewitt, had been Diana’s riding instructor at Kensington
Palace. Although he would initially claim that he and Diana had not met until after Harry’s birth, ginger-haired Hewitt changed his story in 2005, claiming under hypnosis that their affair had begun in earnest shortly after William’s birth in June 1982. In early 1984, he received an urgent call from the Princess. “I’m pregnant, James,” she told him.

Perhaps Charles was too busy to remember precisely whom he slept with, or when. What neither Diana nor Camilla knew was that, less than three months earlier, Charles had secretly resumed his affair with Janet Jenkins at Highgrove. “We slipped back into that familiar intimacy,” Jenkins said, “that predated the marriage.” When Jenkins married a wealthy Canadian businessman that December, she was already three months pregnant.

Diana, unaware that Jenkins was back in the picture, took some consolation in the fact that Charles was a doting father. Despite all the hours spent with other women and a schedule packed with walkabouts, charity events, and groundbreakings, the Prince clearly reveled in spending time with the rambunctious toddler his parents called “Wills.”

As her second pregnancy drew to a close, Diana was hopeful that the dark cloud of gloom that had always hung over the marriage had begun to recede. The last six weeks before Harry’s birth, Charles and Diana were “very, very close to each other—the closest we’ve ever, ever been and ever will be.”

When Henry Charles Albert David was born on September 15, 1984, she called Hewitt from the hospital to tell him it was a boy—minutes before the happy news was announced to the world at large.

The child, she told him, clearly hoping to elicit a response, had red hair.

..........

CHARLES, WHO HAD HOPED FOR
a girl and was well aware of Diana’s infatuation with Hewitt, took one look at Harry and snapped “Oh, God, it’s a boy. And he even has red hair.”

This was the moment, Diana later said, when “something inside me closed off.”

Diana’s mother, Frances Shand Kydd, was also aware of the rumors concerning Hewitt. When Charles continued to complain at the christening that Harry had “rusty hair,” Shand Kydd knew what he was implying. “You should just be happy,” she reminded him, “that your son is healthy.” Unaccustomed to being lectured in such a manner, Charles refused to have any further contact with his mother-in-law.

As Harry grew to look less like a Windsor and more like Hewitt, Camilla wondered aloud to an old family friend if the rumors could be true. At the point Harry was conceived, Charles was spending nearly all his time—or at least so Camilla thought—with his mistress, not his wife. In the end, she tamped down whatever suspicions she may have had. Charles was utterly devoted to both his sons, and any scandal involving Harry’s paternity would only tear the Prince of Wales—not to mention the monarchy—apart.

William was five and Harry not yet three when Charles moved more or less full-time into Highgrove—away from the city-loving Diana and just twelve minutes from Middlewick House, the eighteenth-century manor Camilla and Andrew Parker Bowles now called home. From this point on, things took an almost comical cloak-and-dagger turn as Charles and Camilla plotted and schemed, clumsily, to conceal their affair from Diana.

On those days when Diana was at Highgrove, Charles would crawl out of his bed to tryst with Camilla just inside the garden walls. Then Charles would creep back into his room, put on a new pair of pajamas—and leave his valet, Ken Stronach, a pile of dirty clothes to deal with.

“There was mud and muck everywhere,” Stronach recalled. “They’d obviously been doing it in the open air.”

On other occasions, when Diana remained in the city, Stronach was instructed to treat Camilla as mistress of the house. A guest room was assigned to her, but after midnight the Prince of Wales would switch off the elaborate alarm system guarding his room so that Camilla could sneak in. Stronach was told to mess up the bed in Camilla’s room so that the servants would think she had slept in it.

Stronach also had orders to personally examine all glassware to make sure there were no lipstick traces, and to empty all ashtrays that the chain-smoking Camilla might have used. Charles always kept a framed photo of Camilla at his bedside; packing it away was on Stronach’s growing list of things to do whenever Diana popped in to Highgrove.

Wielding his considerable influence to make sure that Parker Bowles’s assignments kept him far from home for weeks or months at a time, Charles frequently called on Camilla at Middlewick House. Once Royal Protection officers alerted Camilla that the Prince was on his way, all lights at Middlewick House were switched off so he could pull inside Middlewick’s driveway without being spotted—a bit of espionage Camilla’s servants called “The Blackout.” Since Charles always slept in Camilla’s room and then departed before daylight, they called him “The Prince of Darkness.”

On one occasion, Diana arrived at Highgrove unannounced to find Charles’s room staged with props: a half-eaten snack, an empty glass of sherry, a folded TV guide with shows circled in pencil—all designed to make it look as if he had just stepped out.

“I mean,
really
,” she screamed before collapsing on his bed with laughter.

It wasn’t really a laughing matter to Diana, though, and she let Charles know. The Prince was stony and evasive, but when she could corner him their arguments escalated quickly. “Do you know who I am?” he demanded during one shouting match.

“You are a fucking animal!” was Diana’s blunt reply. Doors slammed, crockery and glassware flew indiscriminately, and during one spat an angry Charles hurled his heavy boots against a wall. The couple’s respective bodyguards worried where this all might lead. It was already well established that Diana suffered severe bouts of depression that led her to harm herself. Now Charles was telling royal lawyer Lord Arnold Goodman, “I have nothing to live for.” Goodman went so far as to label the Prince of Wales as “suicidal”—a result of the severe depression he felt over the unraveling of his marriage and the impact it was having on his children. “We went through Highgrove and locked up all the firearms,” a Royal Protection officer said. “We didn’t want anyone getting shot. They were so angry, it was a real possibility.”

The children were already caught in the crossfire. When Diana, weeping after a particularly bitter row, locked herself in the bathroom, ten-year-old William slipped tissues under the door. “Mummy, don’t cry,” he told her. “I hate to see you sad.”

Camilla commiserated with her lover, but reassured him that Diana would eventually accept the status quo. “Camilla felt that somehow Diana hadn’t caught on to their little game,” a friend of
both women said, “and that if she had, she would play by the rules as all royal wives have.”

Kanga Tryon believed Camilla was convinced that “Diana had no choice, that she’d just grow up. What the hell was she going to do? Divorce was not an option. No one thought the Queen would ever allow it.”