Game of Crowns: Elizabeth, Camilla, Kate, and the Throne (22 page)

Charles understood that the Queen could not counter her mother’s wishes. At the same time, if there was any hope of perhaps someday marrying the woman he loved, the Queen would have to meet her. The Prince of Wales had, in fact, made securing his mother’s tolerance (if not approval) of Camilla the number-one priority for his staff.

No one was more dismayed and irritated by the Queen’s two-decade-long snub than the Prince of Wales’s mistress, who concocted a plan to end it. Charles and Camilla were both longtime friends of King Constantine of Greece, who was about to turn sixty and happened to also be the Queen’s third cousin. If Charles hosted a birthday party at Highgrove for the King, Charles’s mother would be hesitant to insult her fellow monarch by not attending.

“For royal watchers,” said the
New York Times
’s Warren Hoge,
“birthday party attendance has become an important measure of whether the sovereign’s thumb is up or down.” On June 3, 2000, the Queen showed up with one hundred other guests at the Highgrove party for King Constantine, and met Camilla for the first time since her affair with Charles began. Camilla made a low, formal curtsy, and then she and the Queen engaged in small talk, apparently about their shared love of horses, before heading off to different tables for what was described as a “barbecue lunch.”

It was a significant gesture. “The Queen is cool in her judgment and would have assessed the whole issue,” said constitutional expert Lord St. John of Fawsley. “It is a very good thing that this potential rift between Her Majesty and the Prince of Wales has been healed.” St. James’s Palace was quick to assert that the meeting, although significant, did not mean Charles had any intention of marrying Camilla. They pointed, in fact, to his pledge at the time of his divorce that he would never remarry. Pressed on the point, Charles’s staff insisted yet again that Camilla had “no interest in becoming queen.”

Privately, it was an entirely different matter.

“Prince Charles and Camilla were walking on air,” said one guest at the party. With good reason. Over the past two years, Charles had stepped up the campaign to make Camilla palatable to the public. He and Camilla were even photographed enjoying each other’s company on a ten-day Greek island cruise, and, although photos of Camilla with William and Harry were strictly forbidden, Charles’s staff fed numerous stories to the press about her warm relationship with Diana’s young sons.

To underscore Camilla’s potential as a representative of the monarchy, Charles dispatched her on a high-profile solo trip to New York. With the Prince’s media spinmeister Mark Bolland at
her elbow, Camilla was photographed with the likes of philanthropy queen Brooke Astor, designer Oscar de la Renta,
Vogue
editor Anna Wintour, media tycoon Michael Bloomberg, and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. Astor, then ninety-seven, had actually met Camilla’s great-grandmother Alice Keppel in the 1930s, more than two decades after Edward VII’s death. By then the late King’s mistress, who had never actually been considered a beauty, was shunned by society and had begun her descent into alcoholism. “Mrs. Parker Bowles wanted to know everything, but at the time most people believed Mrs. Keppel to be a wanton woman and a schemer,” Astor later said. “She ended up a rather pathetic figure. I thought it best to change the subject, considering.”

THE FATE OF THE HOUSE
of Windsor would have to wait as Prince William sorted out his academic future. After he aced his A-levels—the British equivalent of finals and the SATs combined—and graduated with honors, William had his pick of any institution of higher learning in the world. (The notion that any university would turn down the future King of England even if he were a mediocre student seemed, in the words of one British journalist, “laughable.”)

The pressure on William to attend Oxford (the Spencers’ alma mater) or Cambridge (Charles’s) was such that he decided to choose neither. Instead, he took Granny’s advice and began considering Scottish universities. Nationalism was on the rise in Scotland, and the Queen’s advisors were warning her that a referendum to break away from the United Kingdom seemed likely at some point. It could only help matters for the Crown, she suggested
over tea, if for the very first time an heir to the throne attended a Scottish university.

At first unaware that William was considering breaking with tradition to attend a college in Scotland, Kate Middleton was also weighing her options. Carole Middleton, in particular, wanted all her of children to attend one of three elite British universities—the kinds of institutions where, Dorothy Goldsmith told her cousin, “you meet the sons of all the right people.”

As had been the case for William, Oxford and Cambridge were the default choices. But Kate had her eye on a career curating contemporary art and photography shows, and the University of Edinburgh in Scotland was known for having a particularly strong arts curriculum. After visiting the Edinburgh campus together, Kate and her mother agreed that it was the best place for her to pursue a degree in art history. Another deciding factor: By late spring of 2000, newspapers were reporting that Prince William would be attending Edinburgh once he completely his “gap year” doing volunteer work abroad.

Like many of their art student peers, Kate headed for Florence, where she divided her time among museums and galleries and sidewalk cafés. William’s gap year, however, was meticulously crafted by the Palace to plump up the resume of a monarch-in-training.

First stop: the jungles of Belize in Central America, where William encountered poisonous snakes, wild boars, mosquitoes, and scorpions while training with a unit of the Welsh Guards. Then came a three-week expedition with the Royal Geographical Society’s marine observation program, scuba diving and snorkeling off Rodrigues Island in the Indian Ocean.

Before embarking on his next adventure, William returned to London, only to face another, wholly unexpected challenge. Diana’s former private secretary, Patrick Jephson, had published
Shadows of a Princess
, a scathing indictment of the Princess that portrayed her as shrewd, unstable, and manipulative.

With permission from both Charles and the Queen, William gave his first-ever press conference to defend his mother’s memory. Incredibly, the Press Complaints Commission had done such a splendid job of keeping journalists at bay that this marked the first time the public had actually heard William’s voice. The Heir allowed that both he and Harry were “quite upset” about Jephson’s book—that “our mother’s trust has been betrayed and that even now she is still being exploited.”

One person in particular delighted in anything that portrayed Diana as an emotionally unbalanced Machiavellian schemer. The implications for Camilla’s own standing in terms of public opinion were glaringly obvious. At one of their small Highgrove gatherings, Charles railed against Jephson, only to have Camilla blurt out, “Well, yes, darling, but it is all
true
, isn’t it?”

In October 2000, William headed out on his own again—this time to a remote village in southern Chile where for three months the heir to the British throne chopped wood, scoured latrines, and taught English to local schoolchildren.

Once back home in February 2001, William milked cows as a minimum-wage worker on a dairy farm in southwest England—his favorite gap year experience, he would later conclude. More important, it was during this time that he also made his first official public appearance as a senior member of the Royal Family—and his first appearance alongside his father at a public event. The occasion was the tenth anniversary of the Press Complaints
Commission. To insure continued cordial relations with Fleet Street, this was William’s way of thanking the press for keeping a respectful distance while he was at Eton and during the first part of his gap year.

The Queen knew she was powerless to prevent her headstrong son from being seen publicly with his mistress, but she warned Charles that under no circumstances was Camilla to be seen in the same photograph as William—not even in the background. (Harry stayed away, submerged in his studies at Eton.)

Arriving at the Press Complaints Commission party fifteen minutes after the princes, Camilla remained stationary while father and son worked the opposite end of the room for ninety minutes. Charles and William then left together, without ever having been within fifty feet of Camilla. “It was brilliant, the manner in which they pulled that off,” allowed one London
Sunday Times
reporter. “Particularly when you consider there were more than five hundred journalists milling about.”

One more gap year adventure was to come. Six weeks after making his first official public appearance and deftly avoiding Camilla, William was hard at work at the Lewa Conservancy, a fifty-five-thousand-acre wildlife preserve in northern Kenya. For the next four months, he coped with snakes, wild dogs, and every conceivable sort of giant insect when he wasn’t walking fence lines, digging ditches, or tracking wildlife. There was no electricity and no plumbing, and the Heir showered like everyone else, beneath a canvas bucket.

For a young man spending time in what one writer called a “secret Eden,” there were other compensations—namely, working closely with the sanctuary owner’s strikingly attractive nineteen-year-old daughter, Jessica “Jecca” Craig, under the hot African
sun. Soon, they were swept up in a breathless romance. At one point, William went so far as to stage a mock wedding proposal, getting down on one knee at the foot of Mount Kenya to jokingly ask Jecca if she would marry him.

Back home in England, meanwhile, a series of new scandals were brewing that would rock the monarchy to its foundations. With Charles and William away from Highgrove, the Spare was left to his own devices. Prince Harry was still two years below Britain’s legal drinking age of eighteen, but that didn’t stop him from tossing back pints of ale with gin and vodka chasers in the bar at the local Rattlebone Inn. On at least one occasion, he became so drunk that—royalty or not—Harry and his friends were unceremoniously thrown out, as one patron put it, “on their aristo arses.”

Public drunkenness was one thing, but when Charles learned that Harry had been smoking marijuana in a toolshed behind the Rattlebone Inn, he took immediate action. Harry was sent to spend a day with recovering heroin and cocaine addicts at the Featherstone Lodge Rehabilitation Center in South London. The prince was “completely shocked,” said Featherstone staff member Wilma Graham. “It was quite an eye-opener for Harry.”

It was certainly an eye-opener for the country. It would be months before the press got wind of Harry’s pot smoking, but when it did the headlines were scathing.
PRINCE HARRY: I TOOK DRUGS,
blared the
Daily Mail
headline, while the
News of the World
went with melodramatic
HARRY
’
S DRUG SHAME.

The “Harry Pothead Affair,” as it soon came to be called, was only the tip of the iceberg. On August 16, 2001, former royal butler Paul Burrell, the man Diana called “My Rock” and a longtime
personal favorite of the Queen, was charged with stealing 342 items worth an estimated $7.7 million from the late Princess’s Kensington Palace apartments.

No one in the Royal Family believed it was possible. Burrell was the man who dressed Diana’s body for burial, and who took William and Harry by the hand and gently led them from room to room in Kensington Palace when they selected their mother’s keepsakes. But Scotland Yard insisted they had substantial evidence that Burrell was selling some of Diana’s most prized possessions in the United States—a claim that later turned out to be patently untrue.

Burrell insisted that all the items uncovered by the authorities in his home were either gifts from the Princess or items he had been entrusted with for safekeeping. William and Harry implored their father to come to Burrell’s defense, but to no avail. As long as investigators insisted they had a strong case, Prince Charles was reluctant to get involved. Why, then, didn’t William step up to defend his mother’s confidant? Insisting that William knew Burrell “better than anyone else,” Richard Kay said “everyone wondered why he wasn’t coming forward early on to say, ‘This is crazy. Paul Burrell would never steal anything from Mother.’ ”

Certainly the Queen knew that to be true. Not long after Diana’s death, the butler had asked for a private meeting with the Queen. During their chat, Burrell informed Her Majesty that he was holding on to some of Diana’s things temporarily for safekeeping, and she nodded in approval. Elizabeth later recalled that nothing about what Burrell said seemed “the least bit extraordinary.”

It was at this point in the conversation, however, that the
Queen spoke up, warning Burrell to “be careful” of the mysterious “powers at work” in the country. Burrell remembered that she was “deadly serious” and “clearly warning me to be vigilant.”

Her Majesty knew all too well that, whatever other psychological problems Diana may have had, the Princess of Wales was not being irrational when she complained of being spied on by the government. Diana “was not being paranoid at all,” said her longtime Royal Protection officer, Ken Wharfe. “Her every move was being watched,” Wharfe said. “They routinely taped the Princess’s telephone calls. Princess Diana was under constant surveillance.”

As it turned out,
every
member of the Royal Family was being spied on by Britain’s intelligence agencies. “Their personal conversations, both on the phone and sometimes person to person, are monitored and recorded,” said Glynn Jones, one of the British military surveillance experts placed in charge of spying on Diana. In addition, “many of their movements are captured on videotape. It’s impossible for them to keep any secrets. The most personal things are recorded. Charles, Camilla, and William are always under surveillance by secret service personnel.”

Nevertheless, Burrell, who incorrectly assumed the Queen was exempt from such incursions on her privacy, considered his conversations with the sovereign to be strictly confidential. The butler clung to the belief that his Queen, seeing that her trusted servant was being prosecuted for a crime she knew he did not commit, would come forward on her own. Yet no member of the Royal Family spoke up. “The silence was deafening,” he said. “I thought I was being fed to the lions.”