Game of Crowns: Elizabeth, Camilla, Kate, and the Throne (12 page)

Camilla was at her younger sister Annabel’s fortieth birthday party, chatting with Charles and another male guest downstairs, when the party turned very quiet. Suddenly Diana appeared in the room. “Okay, boys,” she said, “I’m just going to have a quick word with Camilla and I’ll be up in a minute.” They shot out of the room, Diana later said, “like chickens with no heads.” She sensed “all hell breaking loose” among the partygoers upstairs, and she was right. Charles had no idea what his unpredictable wife was up to, and he feared the worst.

Charles’s wife got straight to the point. “Camilla,” she said, “I would just like you to know that I know exactly what is going on between you and Charles. I wasn’t born yesterday.”

Camilla’s hands were trembling; the ice in her vodka and tonic clinked loudly. Had she obeyed proper protocol, the woman Diana derisively called “The Rottweiler” would have curtsied the moment Diana entered the room. Aside from being the most famous woman on the planet, Diana outranked every woman in the realm except for the Queen and the Queen Mother.

Instead, Camilla demanded to know why Diana refused to simply look the other way. “You’ve got everything you ever wanted,” she said pleadingly. “You’ve got all the men in the world to fall in love with you and you’ve got two beautiful children. What more do you want?”

Taken aback by Camilla’s impudence, Diana shouted back,
“I want my husband. I’m sorry I’m in the way, I obviously am in the way and it must be hell for both of you but I do know what is going on. Don’t treat me like an idiot.”

Curiously, the confrontation between the two women did not have the intended consequences. Rather than feel contrite, Charles saw Camilla as the victim, and upbraided Diana for her “monstrous” behavior. While a devastated Diana wept over the hopelessness of her situation, Camilla now saw in Diana a worthy adversary. If the Princess could not be mollified, then a formal separation was indeed possible—and with it the possibility of even more time with Charles. “Charles does not like to be pushed,” Janet Jenkins said. “Diana pushed too far, and Camilla took advantage of that.”

No matter. The twentieth century had entered its final decade, and Diana was now intent on seeing her son William crowned the next monarch—not Charles. Toward that end, she would wage a public relations campaign to discredit her husband.

Part of the plan involved portraying Charles as an uncaring, uninvolved father.

THE WORLD KNEW OF DIANA’S
love for her children; their trips to theme parks, movie theaters, and fast-food restaurants—all designed to give William and Harry something akin to a “normal” childhood—were well documented by the press. So, too, were visits to hospitals and homeless shelters that Diana hoped would instill in the young princes a sense of compassion and civic responsibility.

Less well-publicized was Charles’s own warm and nurturing relationship with his sons. Like his parents before him, the Prince
eschewed public displays of affection, deeming them undignified, unmanly, and, in the words of one courtier, “unworthy of a royal personage. They are all that way. Prince Philip is the worst.”

Yet behind closed doors, Charles clearly relished the time spent with his frisky young sons. When William and Harry were toddlers, he got down on the floor for playtime, read them bedtime stories, and even joined them in the bath, commanding a fleet of toy boats and yellow rubber ducks.

As the boys grew older, Diana engaged them at least twice a week in ferocious, to-the-death pillow fights. Not to be outdone, Charles concocted a game called Big Bad Wolf. The rules: Papa stood in the center of the room, and William and Harry would try to get out. As they scrambled for the door, Charles snatched them up and tossed them on the couch. Then they’d bolt for the door again, only to be sent flying by Big Bad Wolf Papa—much to their squealing delight. Similar games were played during summer weekends at Highgrove, with Papa alternately tossing his sons into the pool, carrying them on his shoulders, and challenging them to furious splash-fights.

Charles was so smitten with the boys that he wanted to buck royal tradition and not send them to boarding school at the age of eight. Instead, he told Diana he wanted William and Harry to simply continue at Wetherby, the day school located at Notting Hill Gate, just five minutes from Kensington Palace. “I think sending small children to boarding school is an appalling tradition—singularly British,” agreed Penelope Leach, the noted British child care expert. “Eight is awfully young for any child to be away from his parents.”

But Diana, claiming that Royal Protection officers felt it would be easier to protect the boys at boarding school, signed William
up for Ludgrove, an exclusive school in Wokingham, Berkshire. There William, and later Harry, slept eight to a room in spartan dormitories with peeling paint on the walls and cold, bare wooden floors. There was no television, not even radio.

“I wanted them to stay home where I could spend time with them,” Charles told Janet Jenkins. “I know Diana was upset about sending them off to Ludgrove, but it was more important to her that I be shown who had the power. She wanted to hurt me by sending the boys away, and she did.”

Amazingly, the public was largely unaware of the rancor within the royal marriage until May 1991, when tabloid reporters made note of the fact that Charles and Camilla just happened to be vacationing in Florence, but without their spouses. “They were so used to getting away with it in England,” celebrity photographer Ron Galella said, “but the European press, especially the Italians—those guys don’t let anything get by.”

A turning point came the following month, when Diana was lunching with a friend at her favorite London restaurant, San Lorenzo, and Charles was once again cozying up to Camilla at Highgrove. William and his classmates had been practicing on the putting green at Ludgrove when one of the other boys took a wild swing and accidentally clocked the young Prince full-force in the forehead. Knocked cold, with blood spurting from the wound in his head, William was taken in a police car to nearby Royal Berkshire Hospital.

According to Highgrove housekeeper Wendy Berry, Charles was “white with shock” at the news. Both he and Diana rushed to William’s bedside, then accompanied him as he was transferred by ambulance to London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital. There, he was to undergo an operation that would check for bone splinters
and fully ascertain the damage. The operation required twenty-four stitches and left William with a permanent four-inch-long scar running horizontally above his left eye.

Diana held William’s hand as he was wheeled into surgery and waited until neurosurgeon Richard Hayward emerged to pronounce the seventy-five-minute operation a success. Charles, however, was nowhere in sight. He had consulted with Camilla and they both agreed there was nothing to be accomplished by his remaining at Great Ormond Street Hospital. Leaving his son in the hands of the professionals, he had gone ahead with plans to attend a performance of
Tosca
at Covent Garden, telling his guests in the royal box that William’s condition was “not too bad.” From the opera, he took a train to an environmental conference in North Yorkshire.

Meanwhile, a distraught and exhausted Diana, still concerned that the injury might have some lingering effects—primarily infection leading to epilepsy or meningitis—stayed with William at Great Ormond Street. “Her reaction to William’s accident was horror and disbelief,” said Diana’s friend James Gilbey. “By all accounts it was a narrow escape. She can’t understand her husband’s behavior.”

Neither could the British public, which was quickly consumed with rage over what it saw as Charles’s callous indifference to the well-being of his own son.
WHAT KIND OF DAD ARE YOU?
screamed the headline in the next day’s
Sun
.

CAMILLA HAD SERIOUSLY UNDERESTIMATED HER
rival. According to Jenkins, Charles’s mistress told him that Diana was “cold and calculating” in her ability to manipulate public opinion, to
get the press to “tell the story she wants to tell, whether it’s the truth or not.”

“Cold” was the adjective that Diana most often used to describe her husband—and his family. It seemed to Diana that William and Harry, now nine and seven respectively, were just beginning to get an inkling of what she meant. “Diana used to say, ‘They are all so cold. They have no heart,’ ” her friend Lady Elsa Bowker said. During visits to Buckingham Palace, Windsor, Sandringham, even Balmoral, the little princes now seemed to pay more attention to the fact that every grown-up without exception—including generals in uniform and important government leaders like the Prime Minister—bowed to Granny. More than that, most of them seemed tense and apprehensive around her.

“William and Harry could see them all bowing, everyone afraid to do or say the wrong thing in Her Majesty’s presence,” Bowker continued. “Their grandfather Prince Philip having to walk behind their grandmother—for two small boys, it was very intimidating.” It was indeed a lesson, but one that Diana was determined they learn, even at this early date.

The brothers began to understand that “it was more than just respect for the Queen that made people bow and scrape,” Bowker said. “It was fear.”

I have no idea what to say to her.

—THE QUEEN, AFTER DIANA WEPT TO HER ABOUT CHARLES AND CAMILLA

If anything ever happens to me, do you think they’ll think of me as another Jackie Kennedy?

—DIANA, TO ROYAL MILLINER PHILIP SOMERVILLE

You don’t know how to behave when someone is making such a mess. You want to help them mend, but how to do it?

—ELIZABETH II, TO LADY PATRICIA BRABOURNE, ABOUT DIANA

All my hopes are on William now.

—DIANA, TO TINA BROWN AND ANNA WINTOUR

WINDSOR CASTLE

3:00 P.M., FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 1992

HER MAJESTY’S FORTY-FIFTH WEDDING ANNIVERSARY

She stood in Wellingtons and a hooded macintosh, shock and anguish etched on her face as she watched the orange-red flames blaze high above her beloved castle. She covered her mouth as if to stifle a scream as the roof above the state apartments collapsed with a deafening roar. A helmeted fireman standing next to her could offer no words of comfort.

Hours earlier, the Queen was about to accept the credentials from diplomats at Buckingham Palace when Prince Andrew called with the news that a conflagration was consuming Windsor. During extensive renovations, a spotlight left on by a worker had touched a curtain in the Private Chapel, and the resulting fire had spread to more than one hundred rooms, including the State
Dining Room, the Green Drawing Room, the Octagon Dining Room, the Crimson Drawing Room, and the Grand Reception Room. Scores of volunteers pitched in to rescue as much as possible of the furniture, paintings, artifacts, and other valuables, and when it was all over the Queen herself ventured inside to retrieve whatever personal items she could.

“It was the most shaken I ever saw her,” her private secretary, Robert Fellowes, said. The Queen Mother (known affectionately as “the Old Queen” by downstairs staff) invited her daughter (“the Young Queen”) to stay with her that night at Royal Lodge, the Queen Mother’s residence in Windsor Park. The next week, in a letter addressed to “Darling Mummy” (the Queen Mother addressed her letters to the Queen “My Darling Angel”), Elizabeth thanked her for taking her in the day of the fire. “It made all the difference to my sanity,” she wrote, “after that terrible day.”

It was more than just one terrible day, of course, that had left the Queen to deal with unfamiliar feelings of doubt and even shame. The fire at Windsor Castle seemed to be divine retribution for a Royal Family run amok.

IT HAD ALL BEGUN WITH
the disintegration of Prince Andrew’s marriage to the spirited redhead who once called herself Diana’s best friend, Sarah Ferguson. Starting in January, the scandal would reach its zenith that summer of 1992 when the
Daily Mirror
ran photos of a topless Duchess of York having her toes sucked while vacationing on the French Riviera by her American “financial advisor,” thirty-seven-year-old John Bryan.

Fergie recalled that, over breakfast at Balmoral the day the
Mirror
story hit the stands, the Queen and her guests sat “eyes
wide and mouths ajar.” The Duchess of York had been “exposed for what I truly was. Worthless. Unfit. A national disgrace.” The Queen, who often lost her temper but seldom flew into a rage, was “furious” with Fergie and let her know it. This display of anger “wounded me to the core,” Fergie said, “all the more because I knew she was justified.”

By the time the toe-sucking scandal erupted, the Palace was already reeling from that spring’s release of Andrew Morton’s bombshell book
Diana: Her True Story
. Essentially dictated to Morton by Diana herself—a fact that would not come out for years—the book recounted in graphic detail Diana’s bouts with suicidal depression caused by her unfeeling husband and his scheming mistress.

The Queen was determined to save Charles’s marriage for the sake of the children and to avoid a constitutional crisis. It was possible, Palace legal advisors initially pointed out, that Charles would have to relinquish his claim on the throne if he insisted on divorcing his wife. Diana and Charles were summoned to Windsor Castle for an emotional meeting with the Queen—whom Diana was told to always call “Mama”—and Prince Philip. Diana later told Paul Burrell that, when she and Charles raised the possibility of splitting, the Queen instructed them to “learn to compromise, be less selfish, and try to work through your difficulties for the sake of the monarchy, your children, the country, and its people.”

Neither the Queen nor Diana—nor Camilla, for that matter—were aware that, while the realm was still reeling from the disclosures in Andrew Morton’s book, Charles was enjoying another illicit rendezvous with Janet Jenkins at Highgrove. For more than four hours, Jenkins, whose son, Jason, was now eight, held
Charles’s hand and listened patiently as the Prince complained bitterly about his relentlessly demanding wife and the toll their rancorous breakup was taking on the children. Charles was, Jenkins recalled, “consumed with worry over the psychological health of the boys—how all the fighting and bitterness would affect them in later life.”