Game of Crowns: Elizabeth, Camilla, Kate, and the Throne (15 page)

Here, too, resides one of the world’s great art collections: paintings by Rubens, Van Dyck, Canaletto, Gainsborough, Lawrence, Hogarth, Reynolds, Rembrandt, and Holbein line the walls, as well as a six-foot-high malachite urn given to Queen Victoria by Czar Nicholas I and six Gobelin tapestries. From the parapets, however, one cannot ignore the cooling tower of a nuclear power plant rising in the distance, or the passenger jets flying low as they make their approach to Heathrow. (Passengers on one of these flights were treated to Princess Diana donning the uniform of a Virgin Airlines flight attendant, then getting on the plane’s public address system to offer some commentary: “If you look out the window to your right now, you’ll see Granny’s place.”)

From her bedchamber, the Queen could see more than just power plants and jets screaming overhead. She had a clear view of Eton’s redbrick chimneys, wrought-iron gates, Gothic turrets, and mullioned windows. Founded by Henry VI to train young
scholars for another institution of higher learning he established, King’s College, Cambridge, Eton had been preparing the sons of Europe’s most influential families for life on the world stage for 558 years. History, as George Orwell once famously proclaimed, was “decided on the playing fields of Eton.”

Where Charles had been by turns teased and shunned by the other, less aristocratic boys at Gordonstsoun, Wills fit in well with the sons of Arab sheiks, barristers, political leaders, bankers, financiers, and British nobles who made up Eton’s student body of thirteen hundred. Like his schoolmates, Wills strolled Eton’s manicured lawns in stiff white collar, striped trousers, and a swallowtail coat. Unlike them, he was shadowed by a nineteen-member security detail and carried his own transmitter for tracking purposes.

At exactly 3:50 p.m. every Sunday, a car picked William up at school and drove down Eton High Street, past the Home on the Bridge restaurant and the 581-year-old Cockpit pub, then over the small span linking Eton to the village of Windsor. Just as often, William, accompanied by two guards packing Heckler and Koch machine pistols, walked to Windsor Castle—a journey of less than seven minutes on foot.

Once at Windsor Castle, William proceeded directly to the Oak Drawing Room for tea with the Queen at 4:00 p.m. Diana had, of course, taken pains to give her children “an understanding of people’s emotions, people’s insecurities, people’s distress, and people’s hopes and dreams.” But it was left to the Queen to school William on what it meant to be a modern monarch—Chairman of “The Firm.”

The future king was accustomed to Granny’s efforts at trying to sneak a history lesson in wherever she could—a letter from
Thomas Cromwell to Henry VIII, perhaps, or notes from her own first meeting with Winston Churchill. But like any grandmother, Elizabeth was eager to know what was happening in William’s life—how his studies were going, what sporting events he was competing in, who his friends were and what they were like. Since, like all Windsors, they shared a passion for horses, the Queen also quizzed William on how his polo was progressing—at fifteen he was just starting to play—and talked to him about which of her thirty thoroughbreds would be racing this year.

The Queen’s focus was on molding a future king, so she was more likely to ignore Harry’s misconduct while making William toe the line. Once, while riding at Balmoral, William suddenly took off alone, leaving his groom—and his security detail—scrambling to catch up. Later, back at the castle, “the Queen tore a strip off Prince William,” a member of the household staff recalled. This rare fit of royal pique was, added the staffer, “only out of concern for his safety.”

Diana was concerned for her son’s emotional well-being when she drove to Eton on November 19, 1995, to warn him that she had done a television interview that was airing on the respected BBC public affairs program
Panorama
the following night.

“I didn’t,” she said, “want it to catch you by surprise.”

SHE HAD TOLD THE MEN
in Gray the same thing five days earlier, on Charles’s forty-seventh birthday. Diana neglected to share any important details with them—certainly not that, in order to avoid detection, compact cameras had been smuggled into Kensington Palace to enable reporter Martin Bashir to conduct a wide-ranging three-hour-long interview with the embattled Princess.
The resulting material was cut down to a compelling fifty-five minutes, and scheduled to air on November 20—the forty-eighth wedding anniversary of the Queen and Prince Philip. Through the Men in Gray, the Queen asked for at least a preview. It was a request Diana flatly denied.

Speaking in hushed tones and looking up from heavily mascaraed lashes, Diana might either have been in total control or teetering on the verge of a meltdown as she answered Bashir’s questions. There was universal agreement that, purely from a media standpoint, the Princess of Wales had delivered what veteran broadcaster Barbara Walters called “a superb performance.” Although the Queen could not bring herself to watch—her advisors were instructed to take notes and report back to her—William did, seated alone before the television set in the headmaster’s study at Eton.

The Queen had rightly suspected Diana’s motives in launching a sneak attack. It was not enough that Diana believed her astrologer’s prediction that Charles would predecease his mother. In light of the whispering campaign portraying her as mentally unstable, the Princess of Wales believed she needed to commence the kind of media offensive that called into question whether her husband was fit to rule.

First, Diana spoke calmly about her reasons for doing the interview, claiming the Prince of Wales’s camp was portraying her as someone who “should be put in a home of some sort,” and that the Royal Family simply dismissed her as “sick, unstable . . . an embarrassment.” She then unburdened herself about her eating disorders, her suicidal depression, the Palace conspiracy against her (“there is no better way to dismantle a personality than to
isolate it”), and her own decision not to “go quietly. . . . I’ll fight to the end.”

She also discussed Camilla (“There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded”), and her own affair with James Hewitt (“Yes, I adored him, yes, I was in love with him”). But what most upset the Palace were the scathing broadsides she leveled at Charles and the Royal Family. Diana speculated that the “top job” would “bring enormous limitations to him, and I don’t know whether he could adapt to that.” She felt Charles would find the role of monarch “suffocating.”

As for herself, Diana wanted “the man in the street” to know she would “always be there for him.” She did not wish to be the next Queen of England, she insisted, but instead wanted only to reign as “the Queen of People’s Hearts. . . . Someone,” she added, “has got to go out there and love people and show it.” No one in the Palace, she said, “is streetwise in any way—nor do they want to be. They don’t believe they should relate to the world, the real world of today. . . . They want me and my children to behave as if we were still in Victorian England.”

Nevertheless, Diana also made a point of asserting that she did not want a divorce, and that she saw “a future ahead—a future for my husband, a future for myself, and a future for the monarchy.”

When he came down to collect William, the housemaster found the young Prince sitting on the sofa, his eyes red from crying. Although his father had said on national television that he never loved Diana, he never mentioned Camilla’s name or professed his love for her. William and Harry had never even met their father’s longtime mistress. But the boys knew Hewitt as their riding instructor and had once been deeply fond of him. To hear
that their mother had been in love with someone they had once trusted was doubly upsetting for William and his brother.

It was not Diana’s only miscalculation. In this round of the Game of Crowns, Diana had, as planned, scored a major public relations victory. A Gallup Poll conducted immediately after the
Panorama
interview was aired showed that three-quarters of the people approved of Diana’s performance, 84 percent found her to be honest, and 85 percent believed that she should serve as a kind of roving ambassador of goodwill for the United Kingdom.

Moreover, she had cast significant doubt on Charles’s future. Now no fewer than 46 percent of Elizabeth II’s subjects felt her eldest son was worthy of the crown. This was the figure that Diana most wanted to see. In a series of maneuvers that evoked all the serpentine intrigue of the court of Henry VIII, Diana was using the media to push Charles out and her son forward as the person best suited to succeed Elizabeth. Diana did not mention that she would likely play a major role in the reign of William V, helping to forge a new, more relevant, populist, and compassionate monarchy as the power behind the throne.

Diana had, unfortunately, seriously overplayed her hand. “This was a sneak attack on the monarchy, there’s no other way to describe it,” said a Clarence House staffer. “Diana was right about one thing—she could not be controlled. And the Palace cannot ever relinquish control.”

The day after the interview aired, the Queen told Prime Minister John Major and the Archbishop of Canterbury that she was cutting Diana loose from The Firm. While Her Majesty sat down at her desk to compose the letter that would change the course of royal history, Diana flew to New York to accept a Humanitarian of the Year Award from United Cerebral Palsy. Radiant in a
shimmering sleeveless, low-cut black evening gown, the Princess showed no sign of concern as she cheerfully mingled with the likes of Colin Powell, Barbara Walters, and her friend Henry Kissinger.

DURING THIS WHIRLWIND VISIT TO
the United States, Diana had one particular reason to be pleased. The Princess and her friend the Duchess of York had often openly fantasized about marrying John F. Kennedy, Jr. For Diana, the connection ran deeper. She had always admired Jackie, and would later say that she hoped William might turn out as well as John when it came to handling the pressures of public life. When Jackie died of lymphoma in May of 1994, Diana wrote condolence letters to both Caroline and John, telling them that their mother had been her role model.

Diana and Kennedy finally arranged to meet at her suite in the Carlyle Hotel on Madison Avenue, ostensibly to talk about the possibility of doing an interview for John’s magazine
George
. For years, the Carlyle had served as JFK’s base of operations in New York; Jackie and her children lived at the hotel during their postassassination transition from Washington to an apartment on Fifth Avenue, and John still spent weekends there when he wanted to escape from the pressures of being
People
magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive.”

After Diana entered the Carlyle through its main entrance on East Seventy-sixth Street, John entered undetected through an unmarked side door on East Seventy-seventh—one of the many ways in and out of the hotel President Kennedy had used to elude the press. Diana’s private secretary, Patrick Jephson, later described the meeting between these two iconic figures as
“brief and businesslike.” Conversely, Diana’s spiritual advisor, Simone Simmons, insisted the Princess told her flatly that she and JFK Jr. “ended up in bed,” that their encounter was “pure lust” and “pure chemistry,” and that Kennedy was “an amazing lover—a ten, the tops.”

Diana’s butler, Paul Burrell, insisted that she and JFK Jr. were never lovers. At the time Kennedy, who had already had affairs with the high-profile likes of Madonna, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Daryl Hannah, was involved with Calvin Klein public relations executive Carolyn Bessette. Although Kennedy went on to marry Bessette, neither seemed particularly interested in being faithful to the other. For his part, Kennedy was coy about his interaction with the Princess of Wales. “Diana had the most unusual upwards glance, really seductive,” John told his friend William Noonan. “The most unusual blue eyes . . .” A one-night stand with the Princess was “certainly not out of the question,” another friend said. “Sometimes he talked a blue streak about the women he slept with—all the lurid details—but with certain women, he could be very closed-mouthed. He had lots of secrets.”

Diana came crashing back to earth soon enough. On December 12, 1995, the Queen wrote Charles and Diana individually, asking—or more to the point instructing—them to seek an “early divorce” that would be “in the best interests of the country.” Both letters were signed “With love from Mama.”

“Diana was crushed,” said one of her closest confidants. “She did not want a divorce. She viewed the Queen as a friend, but the Queen had had enough of scandal.” During a meeting with the Queen, she aired a variety of concerns—from her reluctance to give up her “HRH” status to her concern over the possibility
of Charles’s marrying his mistress and Camilla becoming stepmother to her sons. The Queen made it clear that she believed Charles had no intention of remarrying.

Curiously, Diana also told the Queen that she worried about Charles and William flying together; if something happened and their plane went down, she worried that Harry could not bear all the responsibility that would then fall on his shoulders. Her Majesty assured her that this was unlikely; she also understood the true cause of Diana’s worry. The long-dormant rumors that had swirled about Harry were sprouting up again now that he was growing up to look less and less like a Windsor and more like a Hewitt. If, through some quirk of history, Harry did wind up on the throne, it could precipitate a constitutional crisis unlike any that had gone before. It was, after all, through a quirk of history—the abdication of Edward VIII to marry his American mistress—that Elizabeth wound up queen.

Charles and Diana met at St. James’s Palace, which the Prince of Wales now called home, on February 28, 1996. In an obvious effort to make it appear as if she—and not the Royal Family—was in charge of the proceedings, Diana issued a statement to the effect that she had agreed to Charles’s request for a divorce, that she would still be involved in all decisions relating to the children, and that she would retain her title.