Game of Crowns: Elizabeth, Camilla, Kate, and the Throne (16 page)

Once again, the Queen was forced to rein in her daughter-in-law. Elizabeth issued a statement of her own, making it clear that no issues were resolved until the sovereign said they were. After four months of tough negotiations, the divorce was finalized on August 28, 1996. Diana received a lump-sum cash payment of $22.5 million as well as $600,000 a year to maintain her offices.
She retained all of her titles—Princess of Wales, Duchess of Cornwall, Duchess of Rothesay, Countess of Chester, Countess of Carrick, Baroness Renfrew—but volunteered to give up “Her Royal Highness” status after William told her he didn’t care what she was called. “You’re Mummy,” he shrugged.

Diana leaked details of her conversations with the Queen, strongly implying she had been pressured to give up her royal designation. The Queen put out a statement of her own stating that this was “categorically” untrue. “The decision to drop the title is the Princess’s and the Princess’s alone.”

Diana seized the opportunity to ramp up her image as the most glamorous philanthropist the world had ever known. She took steps to streamline her operation, scaling back the one-hundred-plus charities she actively supported to a more manageable five: the Leprosy Mission, the National AIDS Trust, the Royal Marsden Cancer Hospital, a homeless charity called Centrepoint, and the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital. In addition, she remained patroness of the English National Ballet.

Diana also took it upon herself to focus global attention on the human suffering wrought by land mines. The Queen in particular was astonished by video of Diana walking through minefields in Angola and Bosnia—brave actions that helped lend a sense of urgency to the anti–land mine treaty eventually signed by more than 120 nations. Elizabeth, knowing how devoted William and Harry were to their mother, praised Diana for her courage but cautioned her not to take “any unnecessary chances.”

Diana was concerned for her safety, but not because she risked being obliterated by a land mine. After opting to go it on her own without Royal Protection officers, the Princess was driving her green Audi convertible through London’s Knightsbridge district
when her brakes failed as she approached a traffic light. Her car plowed through the intersection before rolling to a stop. The incident left Diana shaken, but, incredibly, unharmed. “The brakes of my car have been tampered with,” she wrote in separate notes to her friends Simone Simmons, Lady Annabel Goldsmith, Lady Elsa Bowker, and Lucia Flecha de Lima. “If something happens to me it will be MI5 or MI6.” MI5 and MI6 are Britain’s domestic and foreign intelligence agencies.

Diana let it slip to her voice coach and confidant Peter Settelen in 1992 that a close friend had already been assassinated by MI6—or at least that’s what she believed. Five years earlier, Diana’s loyal bodyguard, Barry Mannakee, was fired when it was strongly suspected that he and the Princess were having an affair. Not long after, a car suddenly pulled out of an alleyway, striking his motorcycle. “And he was killed,” she told Settelen. “And I think he was bumped off. . . . He was the greatest fella I ever had.”

BACK IN OCTOBER 1993, DIANA
sat down at her desk in Kensington Palace and wrote a letter that outlined in eerily prescient detail what she thought might ultimately happen to her—but not before railing against her husband and the Palace. “I have been battered, bruised, and abused mentally by a system for years now,” she wrote. “Thank you Charles, for putting me through such hell and for giving me the opportunity to learn from the cruel things you have done to me.”

In her letter, Diana described “this particular phase” in her life to be “the most dangerous. My husband is planning an accident in my car, brake failure and serious head injury in order to make the path clear for Charles to marry.”

Scotland Yard later confirmed that in the letter, which Diana told her butler Paul Burrell to keep “just in case,” the Princess identified someone other than Camilla as Charles’s choice for a second wife—and future queen. According to Diana, the Prince of Wales wanted to “marry Tiggy. Camilla is nothing but a decoy, so we are all being used by the man in every sense of the word.”

In the four years since Charles’s and Diana’s separation was announced, Alexandra “Tiggy” Legge-Bourke had been serving as royal nanny whenever William and Harry spent time with their father. It was an arrangement that irked Diana from the very beginning. “I don’t need a substitute father for the boys when they’re with me,” the Princess complained. “So why does Charles need a substitute mother when they’re with him?”

If Charles was looking for a Diana substitute, in many ways, Tiggy Legge-Bourke fit the bill. The daughter of a Welsh aristocrat and a wealthy merchant banker, the nanny grew up on her family’s six-thousand-acre estate, Glanusk Park, and was even sent to the same Swiss finishing school Diana had attended. A tall, stunning, outgoing thirty-year-old with a hearty laugh to match her big personality, Tiggy also believed in having fun with her royal charges at zoos, amusement parks, movie theaters, arcades, and country fairs when she wasn’t smothering them with kisses and hugs. Unlike the decidedly urbane Diana, Legge-Bourke was, like Charles and Camilla, a dyed-in-the-wool country girl who loved to hike, fish, ride, and shoot.

After a brief stint as a kindergarten teacher—another thing she shared with Diana—Tiggy started her own nursery in central London. Legge-Bourke named the school “Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle” after the hedgehog in Beatrix Potter’s
The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle
.
From then on, the nursery school teacher with the privileged past was simply “Tiggy.”

Diana’s resentment of the role Tiggy played in her young sons’ lives grew markedly in the coming years. Her solicitor, Lord Mishcon, later confirmed that Diana was convinced that “Camilla was not really Charles’s lover, but a decoy for his real favorite, the nanny Tiggy Legge-Bourke.”

“It’s the Men in Gray,” Diana told Lady Elsa Bowker. “They’re trying to brainwash my boys so they will forget me . . . I won’t let it happen.”

P. D. Jephson, Diana’s private secretary, went so far as to warn Legge-Bourke that Charles and the Princess of Wales had no compunction about using their children as unwitting pawns in their seemingly never-ending power struggle. She might, he cautioned the new nanny, find herself caught in the crossfire.

Tiggy responded with a shrug. “Doesn’t bother me,” she said. “I’m just the nursery maid, guv.”

Tiggy ran, swam, rode, and roughhoused with William and Harry. She was also assigned a bedroom adjacent to the boys’ rooms at Sandringham, St. James’s Palace, Balmoral, and Highgrove. Those pillow fights that had once been a nightly ritual for Diana and her sons were now part of their nightly ritual with Tiggy.

Newspapers were soon filled with photographs of Harry sitting on Tiggy’s lap, or the nanny tousling William’s hair as he walked off a muddy polo field. When Tiggy referred to the princes as “my babies” in the press, Diana made it clear she had had enough. In a flurry of letters to her estranged husband, the Princess of Wales demanded that Tiggy’s role in their sons’ lives be drastically curtailed.
Diana asked, among other things, that “Miss Legge-Bourke not spend unnecessary time in the children’s rooms . . . read to them at night, nor supervise their bath time.”

Camilla shared Diana’s distaste for Tiggy. Although the nanny served the dual purpose of freeing Charles to spend time with his adult friends while at the same time being a thorn in Diana’s side, Charles’s mistress referred to Tiggy as simply “the hired help.” She also came up with another nickname for the curvaceous nanny, who had a penchant for wearing skin-tight riding britches and hip-hugging skirts: “Big Ass.”

Like it or not, Tiggy wasn’t going anywhere. During a meeting at Kensington Palace in October 1995, Diana voiced many of the same concerns she had harbored about her safety to her solicitor, Lord Mishcon, and two of his associates—only this time with a new and significant twist. Diana told Lord Mishcon that “the Queen would be abdicating . . . and the Prince of Wales would then assume the throne.” Mishcon went on to say that Diana was “convinced that there was a conspiracy that she and Camilla would be put aside.” At the time, he recalled, “I could not believe what I was hearing.”

Diana was initially told by her spies inside the Palace that “The Abdication Plan” called for the Queen to relinquish the throne in April 1996—more specifically, on the monarch’s seventieth birthday. By then, Diana believed both she and Camilla would have been “set aside” by British intelligence operatives, leaving Charles free to marry her sons’ nanny. This would pave the way for King Charles III to be crowned alongside his “Queen Alexandra” (Tiggy’s real name).

Diana told Mishcon and solicitors Rae and Sandra Davis that
she, on the other hand, was pushing to have the Queen force Charles out of the line of succession so that William could assume the throne as quickly as possible. This, Diana said, was the “ideal solution” to the problem of keeping the monarchy alive in the twenty-first century. Since William was only thirteen at the time, Diana wanted Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, to serve as Regent until the boy turned eighteen. Presumably, Diana felt the Queen, having by then permanently sidelined Charles, would be amenable to having her second son take temporary control.

Whenever the abdication issue was raised, advocates pointed to the example set by Queen Juliana of the Netherlands, a distant cousin and close friend of Elizabeth who relinquished her crown in 1980 at age seventy-one. But in that instance, Juliana was handing off the crown to her popular daughter, Beatrix. Polls continued to show that, in the wake of so many embarrassing scandals, Britons were not ready to see Charles on the throne. By a margin of two to one, they wanted William to succeed his grandmother. “It was simply too tumultuous a time,” Lord Mishcon said, “for the Queen to simply walk away.” Since Elizabeth was only seventy and Charles a relatively youthful forty-seven, “it wasn’t really a difficult decision for her to make.”

Faced with Tiggy’s unfettered presence in her children’s lives, Diana took matters into her own hands. During the Waleses’ annual Christmas party for one hundred of their staff members at London’s Lanesborough Hotel, Diana strolled over to Tiggy and muttered, “So sorry to hear about the baby.” The rumor that Legge-Bourke had aborted Charles’s baby—now broadcast among the Prince of Wales’s closest friends—was enough to send Tiggy running from the party in tears. Tiggy went so far as
to have her solicitor threaten to sue if the Princess didn’t retract her statement and apologize. Diana never did. Shortly before the tawdry tale became public, Patrick Jephson resigned as Diana’s private secretary. He later explained that he was “simply shocked” that Diana had “exulted in accusing Legge-Bourke of having had an abortion.”

As Tiggy’s influence over Charles and the boys increased, Diana became more convinced than ever that a royal conspiracy was afoot. She told Lord Mishcon that factions loyal to Charles were plotting with the Men in Gray to assassinate not only her but the Prince’s longtime mistress. “Camilla is in danger,” she told Lord Mishcon. “They are going to have to get rid of us both.”

(Maggie Rae, another of Diana’s lawyers, believed “it was very clear that Princess Diana thought she was going to be killed.” Lord Mishcon was so concerned that he took detailed notes of Diana’s concerns, which he gave to British authorities just three weeks after the Paris crash that took her life. Incredibly, police suppressed Lord Mishcon’s account for six years, until the final official inquest into Diana’s death in 2003.)

The Queen also took note of Tiggy’s high-profile relationship with Charles and her grandsons. While Legge-Bourke was clearly a positive and stabilizing influence at a chaotic time in the boys’ lives, Her Majesty was well aware of the impact it was all having on Diana’s state of mind—and on the Royal Family’s rapidly deteriorating public image. At one point, according to a courtier, she shared her concerns with Charles, urging him to consider scaling back the nanny’s responsibilities or “risk forcing Diana’s hand.”

In the meantime, Camilla had grown increasingly confident in her role as chatelaine of Highgrove. So self-assured, in fact, that she insisted on sitting next to Janet Jenkins when Jenkins
was invited back to Highgrove in 1996. Charles’s other mistress found Camilla “absolutely charming. Either she didn’t know that Charles and I had been lovers or she didn’t care, because she treated me wonderfully.”

Another of the Prince of Wales’s mistresses had not fared so well. Battling substance abuse, Kanga Tryon checked into a treatment center called Farm Place in 1996, only to suffer a mysterious fall from a third-floor window. She suffered a fractured skull and a broken back, and from this point on was confined to a wheelchair. A year later Kanga, who like Diana was convinced her husband had been plotting to kill her, was committed to a mental institution. Not long after, she died after a minor medical procedure. She was forty-nine.

In March 1997, Diana seized on a second opportunity to get rid of Tiggy during William’s confirmation at Windsor Castle. The Princess complained loudly to Charles when Tiggy, who was put in charge of the guest list, omitted the names of several Spencer relatives. By this time, Diana and Charles were getting along so well that he felt obliged to take action. Within three weeks, Tiggy was out of the picture—at least for the time being.

Oddly, once the divorce became final, the animosity that had defined their marriage was replaced with acceptance, respect, even affection. The turning point, Diana later said, was the day she and her ex-husband proudly looked on as William enrolled at Eton. Now they were on the phone with each other several times a week, usually kibitzing about their boys. When her friend Tess Rock visited the Princess of Wales at Kensington Palace, she crossed paths with Charles. “Did you see Charles?” Diana gushed. “Guess what? He was wearing the sweater I gave him for his last birthday. I was so touched.”

Diana had even begun to accept—even admire—the enduring bond between Charles and Camilla. Now that she had begun giving advice to fifteen-year-old William about what to look for in a mate, the Princess of Wales could think of no better examples than her ex-husband and his mistress. “When you find a true, deep love like that,” Diana told William, “it’s a precious thing. You’ve got to hold on tight to it.” This did not mean she felt warmly toward Camilla per se; rather than hating “The Rottweiler,” Diana viewed her husband’s mistress with a kind of bemused indifference.