Game of Crowns: Elizabeth, Camilla, Kate, and the Throne (20 page)

The Queen, finally beginning to grasp the gravity of the situation, yielded on all points. The next day, she departed for London. As soon as she arrived at Buckingham Palace, the royal standard went up—and when it stopped halfway up the flagpole, the massive crowd that had gathered at the palace gates began to cheer.

On the eve of Diana’s funeral, Elizabeth gave what would be the most important speech of her reign—the speech on which hinged the very existence of Britain’s thousand-year-old monarchy. She did it sitting in the opulently appointed Chinese Dining Room, the crowds milling in front of Buckingham Palace clearly visible in the background. “We have seen, throughout Britain and around the world, an overwhelming expression of sadness at Diana’s death,” Elizabeth II said. “We have all been trying in our different ways to cope. It is not easy to express a sense of loss, since the initial shock is often succeeded by a mixture of other feelings: disbelief, incomprehension, anger—and concern for those who remain.

“So what I say to you now as your Queen and as a grandmother, I say from my heart,” Her Majesty continued. “First, I want to
pay tribute to Diana, myself. She was an exceptional and gifted human being. In good times and bad, she never lost her capacity to smile and laugh, to inspire others with her warmth and kindness. I admired and respected her for her energy and commitment to others, especially her devotion to her two boys.”

The Queen went on to explain that she had remained at Balmoral only to help William and Harry “come to terms with the devastating loss,” and that she believed “there are lessons to be drawn from her life and from the extraordinary and moving reaction to her death.” Taking into account the public’s mounting anger over her absence and her silence, Elizabeth II had learned her lesson the hard way. “I share in your determination,” she pledged, “to cherish her memory.”

At St. James’s Palace, Charles prepared for the possibility that he might be shot down in the streets the next day. He had already done all he could to protect Camilla, ordering that the usual security detail guarding her at Ray Mill House be beefed up with an additional four Royal Protection officers. The “Close Protection Team,” as Prince Charles’s security detail was sometimes called, usually consisted of four plainclothes bodyguards armed with Glock 9-mm pistols. It was doubled to eight.

That night before Diana’s funeral, facing the prospect of his own imminent assassination, Charles sat down in his study and scribbled four brief letters in his distinctive, spidery script—to William, to Harry, to Camilla, and to the people of Great Britain. Each, according to an intimate friend with whom he shared the letters’ contents, was signed, then placed in a small red envelope bearing the three-plumed seal of the Prince of Wales.

In his note to William, Charles lauded his elder son for his
maturity and predicted he would make a great king. He praised Harry for supporting his brother, but at the same time urged him to live his own life and not be overshadowed by William. He told Camilla that she was the only woman he had ever loved, and that, had he lived, he would have fulfilled his promise to make her queen. Writing to his countrymen, Charles noted that, despite making some serious mistakes, he had done his best as Prince of Wales. Charles was now sorry that he would not have the chance to serve his country as its king. The four red envelopes were left on Prince Charles’s desk with instructions to deliver them only “in the event of my death.”

ALONG WITH 2.5 BILLION OTHERS
around the world—the largest audience for a live event in television history—Kate’s family watched the Windsor men walk behind Diana’s casket as it was pulled on a horse-drawn caisson through eerily silent streets lined with an estimated 1.5 million people. “It was the most harrowing experience of my life,” said Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer, who walked between William and Harry. “There was a clear feeling of high emotion around you of the most sad and confused sort, all hammering in on you. It was a tunnel of grief.”

What no one knew at the time was that, from the beginning, Diana’s brother opposed putting fifteen-year-old William and Harry, twelve, through such punishing stress. Spencer later claimed that the Palace’s string-pulling Men in Gray had orchestrated the grim procession from Kensington Palace to Westminster Abbey, and then “tricked” him into believing that the boys had asked to walk behind their mother’s coffin. “I genuinely felt that Diana would
not have wanted them to have done it,” Spencer said. But by the time he learned the truth, it was too late.

The most historically significant moment during the procession occurred just as Diana’s coffin passed in front of Buckingham Palace. Queen Elizabeth, standing outside with her family, bowed her head—a seemingly spontaneous tribute to the young woman who had breathed new life into the monarchy while at the same time pushing it to the brink of extinction.

Of course, there was nothing spontaneous about the Queen’s bow. It was a gesture that had been discussed with Charles, Philip, and the Queen’s cadre of advisors now pushing for some dramatic gesture on Her Majesty’s part—a sign that she truly cared. Elizabeth II was moved to consider bowing to Diana’s coffin only after Charles bluntly cautioned her that, despite whatever concessions she had already made, the Queen might be jeered at the funeral. Scotland Yard, monitoring a flood of threats against the Crown, now feared the Queen might even be attacked.

For Earl Spencer, Her Majesty’s history-making bow in tribute to Diana was all too little, too late. He was especially outraged by the Palace’s duplicity in forcing William and Harry to walk behind their mother’s coffin—a scheme in which he was an unwitting accomplice. It was this final act of deception, Spencer later said, that led him to deliver a scathing attack on the Royal Family during his history-making eulogy inside the Abbey.

It would have been impossible to find a more appropriate setting for Diana’s final, official exit from the Game of Crowns. The tombs of some of history’s most formidable queens—“Bloody Mary” Tudor, Elizabeth I, and Mary, Queen of Scots—were all located in the thousand-year-old Abbey, the site of every coronation since William the Conqueror in 1066.

The Queen sat, expressionless, among two thousand mourners inside the Abbey while Elton John sang “Candle in the Wind 1997,” a moving tribute to his old friend that would become the number-one best-selling single of all time. Even at this late date, the Palace objected to inviting a rock star—albeit a rock star who would be knighted the following year—to perform at such a solemn occasion.

With the sovereign and the rest of the Royals seated just a few yards away, Earl Spencer praised Diana as “someone with a natural nobility who proved in that last year that she needed no royal title to continue to generate her particular brand of magic.” In the name of Diana’s “blood family,” Spencer then pledged to his sister that he “would not allow” William and Harry to “suffer the anguish that used regularly to drive you to tearful despair.” He added that the Spencers would “continue the imaginative way in which you were steering these two exceptional young men so that their souls are not simply immersed by duty and tradition but can sing openly as you planned.”

Prince Charles, who despite his own efforts to pay proper tribute to Diana could still become enraged by such impudence, pounded his knee with his fist. The Queen Mother looked aghast, and First Lady Hillary Clinton, seated not far from the Royal Family, gasped at Spencer’s unexpectedly frank remarks. The Queen, an expert at concealing her emotions, continued to sit sphinxlike, Queen Victoria’s hundred-carat diamond bow brooch glistening on the left shoulder of her black wool suit.

There was little doubt where public sentiment still stood at that moment. The tens of thousands of people who watched the service on jumbo television screens outside the Abbey reacted to Earl Spencer’s attack on the Royal Family with thunderous applause.
The reaction was similar inside, and while William and Harry joined in the applause, the Queen and Queen Mother, Prince Philip, Charles, and the rest of the Royal Family managed to maintain their customary air of benign indifference.

THE FIRM HAD STUMBLED BADLY,
but no member of the Royal Family was as universally despised as Camilla Parker Bowles. It had been only a month since Charles threw his highly touted fiftieth birthday party for Camilla—a pivotal event that signaled widespread public approval of Camilla as Charles’s future bride. In less than two weeks, she was to host a celebrity-packed charity ball that would mark their first appearance together at a public event. Now that event was canceled, and Charles’s long-postponed dream of marrying his mistress was put on hold—perhaps forever.

That would have been perfectly fine with the Middletons, who were planted firmly in Diana’s camp. Kate’s grandmother spoke for the family when she told a neighbor they were “pretty fed up with the way the Royal Family was acting.” Like nearly all of her schoolmates, Kate bemoaned the heartlessness of the Royal Family and cooed over the two young princes who showed such bravery in the face of crushing personal loss.

A familiar face was brought in to help the boys cope. Tiggy Legge-Bourke, who unbeknownst to Diana had been spending time with the boys at Balmoral while Diana was out of the country, rushed in to fill the void. At times, she even cradled Harry to sleep. Everyone agreed that Diana would have approved. “At least Tiggy,” a friend said, “was there to give William and Harry the hugs and kisses the Princess could not.”

Fleet Street also did its part to help the princes get over their
mother’s death. In the immediate aftermath of the crash, paparazzi were blamed for literally hounding Diana to death—until it was determined that Dodi’s driver, who was killed along with Dodi and Diana, was drunk and under the influence of painkillers. Hewing to guidelines imposed by Britain’s watchdog Press Complaints Commission, press photographers agreed to keep a respectful distance from the boys, and not photograph them in private situations until they turned eighteen.

The Men in Gray, no longer burdened by the Princess of Wales’s inconvenient notions of humanizing the monarchy, also took steps to eradicate whatever remained of Diana’s influence in her sons’ lives. Overnight, family and friends, some of whom had known the boys all their lives, were barred from seeing or speaking with William and Harry. Diana’s longtime friend Roberto Devorik tried repeatedly and without success to contact the boys, as did Lady Elsa Bowker, Annabel Goldsmith, Rosa Monckton, and many others. Always the answer was the same: Prince William and Prince Harry were simply “unavailable.”

Regardless of Earl Spencer’s vow that the young princes’ “blood family” would continue to guide them as Diana had done, the Queen and Prince Charles were determined to Windsorize William and Harry. “Blood family?” the Queen had indignantly asked her private secretary. “Are we not ‘blood family’ as well?”

At Eton, Housemaster Andrew Gailey and his wife, Shauna, made certain that William and Harry were completely insulated from any outside influences—and that there would be no calls or visitors not vetted by the Palace. Weekends and holidays were usually devoted to the traditional pursuits of Britain’s upper classes: shooting, polo, and foxhunting.

On December 15, facing their first Christmas without their
mother, William and Harry arrived unannounced at a foxhunt outside London. Although Charles felt it unwise to introduce them to his mistress so soon after Diana’s death, the boys got their first look in person at Camilla, astride a horse and wearing the usual foxhunting getup, known as “ratcatcher”: buff (never white) breeches, shirt and tie, tattersall vest, hacking jacket, black field boots, and hunt cap.

Camilla would not actually meet the future king for another six months—and then only because William felt it was time to get it over with. On June 12, 1998, William was driven by his Royal Protection officers from Eton to London, where he was going to the movies with friends. William called from the car to say he planned to stop by his flat in York House to change, but was warned by his father that Mrs. Parker Bowles happened to be there.

“Fine, I’d love to meet her,” William replied. Camilla wasn’t so sure. For months she had essentially been holed up at her house in Wiltshire, away from the prying eyes of the media. Only recently had she screwed up her courage enough to spend time with Charles at St. James’s Palace and Sandringham.

Camilla was about to bolt, but Charles stopped her. “No, stay,” he said. “This is ridiculous.” Camilla was in the drawing room going over her schedule with her personal assistant, Amanda McManus, when William arrived at 4:00 p.m. and went straight to his rooms upstairs. Charles took her by the arm. “He’s here. Let’s get on with it,” he insisted. “I’m taking you to meet him now.” Understandably flustered when the big moment finally came, Mrs. Parker Bowles curtsied awkwardly, then reached out to accept William’s extended hand.

Charles left Camilla and William alone to chat. It would have
been understandable if both young princes blamed her for their mother’s unhappiness and, at the very least, destroying their parents’ marriage. But William, ever the peacemaker, tried to put Camilla at ease with talk of polo and foxhunting.

Thirty minutes later, William was off to the movies and Camilla was still, as she put it, “trembling like a leaf.” As soon as William was out the door, Camilla plopped into a chair and sighed.

“Charles,” she said, “I
really
need a vodka and tonic.”

Several weeks later, Charles arranged for Harry to meet Camilla at Highgrove. Both boys, apparently remembering that their mother had come to a kind of understanding with their father toward the end, quickly grew fond of Camilla. The frumpy, disheveled, self-deprecating Mrs. PB was miles away from their mother in looks, style, and temperament—which made it much easier for them to like her. “Camilla was more like a colorful aunt to them,” a Highgrove neighbor said. “She was loud and fun, and most important of all, she obviously made their papa very happy.”

The Queen was not quite so amenable. Like Diana’s friends, who complained loudly that the introduction to Camilla was an affront to the Princess’s memory, Her Majesty had not changed her mind about Charles’s mistress. Neither, it turned out, had the Queen Mother. “I cannot bear that woman,” she told the sovereign in the presence of their ladies-in-waiting. “The sheer
gall
.” Not only did the Queen Mother liken Camilla to the late Duchess of Windsor—ironically, the very personification of evil in the eyes of the family that actually bore the name—but she blamed Camilla for steering her favorite grandson away from his princely destiny, threatening to wreck the monarchy in the process.