Game of Crowns: Elizabeth, Camilla, Kate, and the Throne (23 page)

The case dragged on for two years, leaving Burrell’s reputation in tatters. Facing bankruptcy and jail time, he contemplated taking
his own life. Just days before Burrell was to testify, the Queen, Prince Philip, and Charles were on their way to a memorial service when Philip blithely mentioned the Queen’s 1997 conversation with the butler. The Queen told her horrified son that she didn’t think the talk was “significant.” Once Charles passed this information along to the police, the entire case was finally dropped.

“It’s all thanks to the Queen,” Burrell sobbed on the courthouse steps. The butler was saved, but not the Royal Family. During the trial, investigators finally revealed what they were really looking for when they raided Burrell’s house: a mahogany box marked with a “D.” Among items contained in Diana’s “Box of Secrets” was her taped interview with Kensington Palace valet and footman George Smith. On the tape, Smith told Diana he was raped by one of Charles’s most trusted servants—and that he had witnessed this same servant and a member of the Royal Family in a position that could only be described as compromising.

Diana had taken the tape to Charles and demanded that the alleged rapist be fired. Not only did the Prince of Wales dismiss the charge as “staff tittle-tattle,” but he went on to spend nearly $200,000 covering the purported rapist’s legal bills. Eventually, Smith dropped the matter after departing the Palace with a $59,000 cash payment—all of which, understandably, gave rise to charges of a cover-up.

The
Daily Mail
’s full-page headline,
I WAS RAPED BY CHARLES
’
S SERVANT
, left little to the imagination, and it was hard to argue with the sentiment in the follow-up headline,
PANIC GRIPS THE PALACE
. “They’ve really kicked the hornet’s nest, haven’t they?” the Queen muttered while scanning the papers. She had always
been aware of the X-rated goings on inside palace walls, and it was no secret that, like her mother, the Queen had a taste for gossip of even the most salacious variety.

Rape was another matter entirely. When the Queen summoned Charles to Balmoral to explain what he knew about the newest royal scandal, the Prince turned for advice to the woman he now called “My Touchstone”—Camilla.

From the grave, Diana had struck yet another blow to Charles’s reputation. It was the sort of public relations fiasco both he and Camilla could ill afford—not if they had any hope of selling themselves as a royal couple. For a fleeting moment, it may well have occurred to Charles and Camilla that one of the infamous Men in Gray was behind this latest batch of humiliating revelations.

“Buckingham Palace and St. James’s Palace have been at war with each other for a long, long time,” said one courtier. “Charles’s advisors are constantly pushing to give him more to do, to get him on the throne sooner rather than later.” But, he added, “there are also people close to the Queen who strongly believe that Charles will be a total disaster as king.” Operation PB, the Mark Bolland–engineered campaign to revamp Camilla’s image, simply “poured gasoline on the fire.”

LIKE NEARLY ALL OF HER
countrymen, Carole Middleton watched the unfolding Burrell Affair with mounting incredulity. “One wonders,” she asked a Bucklebury neighbor, “how all this makes William and Harry feel. It’s pretty tawdry.” Kate’s mother was consumed with the details of running her flourishing party supply empire, but not so busy that she didn’t notice that William had abandoned his original plan to attend the University of
Edinburgh. Instead, William would be attending the University of St. Andrews, alma mater of his Eton housemaster, Andrew Gailey.

Famous as the place where the sport of golf was invented in the fifteenth century, St. Andrews had a student body of six thousand—roughly half the size of Cambridge’s undergraduate student body and a quarter the size of Oxford’s. St. Andrews was Scotland’s oldest university, and its most remote, jutting into the North Sea some 475 miles north of London. With its Gothic stone architecture, and narrow streets and alleyways with names like Gregory’s Lane, Butts Wynd, and Mercat Gate, St. Andrews oozed history and charm. Since there was also little to do but study and drink, St. Andrews had a reputation as one of the United Kingdom’s premier party schools. At one point, St. Andrews boasted more drinking establishments than any other town in Scotland—twenty-two pubs in the center of town alone.

The Queen was pleased that William was going to St. Andrews, and not merely because she needed to shore up the Crown’s image in Scotland. Scotland Yard had briefed her on the growing number of credible threats to William’s safety—from anti-foxhunting groups, violent elements in the Scottish nationalist movement, and, most disturbingly, a paramilitary splinter group of the Irish Republic Army called the Real IRA.

It had been only three years since the Real IRA set off a bomb in the town of Omagh in Northern Ireland, killing twenty-nine people. The Royal Protection Branch (also known as SO14) determined that it would be easier to protect William at St. Andrews than at the University of Edinburgh, which is located in the bustling center of Scotland’s capital city.

Elizabeth was at Balmoral reviewing some of the security precautions being taken for William at St. Andrews when her new
private secretary, Robin Janvrin, called with news that Islamic terrorists had carried out the 9/11 attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington. After watching the collapse of the Twin Towers on television, she sat down at her desk and wrote to President George W. Bush that she was following events with “growing disbelief and total shock.”

This time, the Queen did not hesitate to order that the Union Jack at Buckingham Palace and all royal residences be lowered to half-staff. She also wanted American music and the American national anthem to be added to the repertoire during the daily Changing of the Guard ceremonies in front of Buckingham Palace. (Compounding the sadness for the Queen that day was the sudden death of her racing manager and best friend since childhood, Lord Carnarvon.)

Three days later, the Queen, Prince Philip, Prince Charles, and other members of the Royal Family joined twenty-seven hundred people in St. Paul’s Cathedral for a memorial service honoring the victims. After the crowd delivered a stirring rendition of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Her Majesty stood up to sing every word of “The Star-Spangled Banner”—loudly. It was the first time an English monarch, who never joins in on her own anthem (“God save . . . me?” she had tried to explain early in her reign to one of her sister’s American friends), ever sang the national anthem of the United States.

It was an important show of sympathy and support for Britain’s American cousins. From this point on, Tony Blair briefed the Queen on all the important details of the war on terror leading up to the invasion of Afghanistan by the United States, Britain, and their NATO allies. Blair also leaned heavily on the monarch for advice. “Obviously, there was a huge focus on the Arab world,”
he recalled, “and that is something she has immense experience of.” After all, he continued, the Queen “knew the royal families over a long, long period of time—she has a lot of real insight into how they work, how they operate, how they think.”

There were other ramifications for the Royal Family. Additional security precautions were initiated following the 9/11 attacks, including the construction of “panic rooms” at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle. In the event of an attack, the Queen and other senior Royals on the premises would be rushed to one of these chambers. Once inside, they would presumably be safe behind eighteen-inch-thick, flame-resistant steel walls designed to withstand a protracted artillery bombardment or a direct hit by a light aircraft.

It may have seemed as if the world was unraveling, but that didn’t keep the British press from being there in force to cover the chaos that accompanied William’s first day on campus. St. James’s Palace gave unfettered access to the press the day of William’s arrival at St. Andrews, provided they agreed to depart after twenty-four hours and never return. “It beggars belief,” said St. Andrews’s rector Andrew Neil, “when I think of the efforts we have gone to to allow William a normal undergraduate life.”

Kate’s mother was more concerned about incursions of a different sort. When she learned that former Marlborough student Mili d’Erlanger, whose name had been linked to William, was headed for St. Andrews, Carole Middleton began lobbying her own daughter to switch. Kate insisted on her original choice—Edinburgh’s art history program was second to none—but Carole flew to Florence to persuade her in person that St. Andrews offered something no other university in the world offered: proximity to the future King of England.

At the beginning, proximity was all they had. No sooner had he moved into his fifteen-by-fifteen-foot room at St. Salvatore’s residence hall than William fell hard for Kate’s friend Carly Massy-Birch, the daughter of a Devon farmer (“They were lovers, yes,” confirmed Mimi Massy-Birch, Carly’s mum). But Carly soon grew tired of William’s bodyguards, who always tailed them in a Land Rover with blacked-out windows and then lurked in the shadows whenever the couple ventured to a restaurant or a pub. After eight weeks of this, she abruptly broke off the relationship.

As it happened, William had not been entirely faithful to Carly. Before enrolling at St. Andrews, he had had a sizzling summer romance with Arabella Musgrave, a fixture at the Beaufort Polo Club near Highgrove. According to one of William’s competitors on the polo field, he was “completely crushed” when Musgrave, rightly suspecting that William had a “roving eye,” abruptly ended their affair. Determined to win “Bella” Musgrave back, the prince made frequent weekend trips to Highgrove even after he had already begun dating Carly Massy-Birch.

Musgrave continued to rebuff his advances, but William would have better luck with other young ladies he romanced while weekending at Highgrove. Rose Farquhar, daughter of the Master of the Beaufort Hunt, had known William since they were children, but things turned serious between them once he graduated from Eton. Then there was Beaufort Polo club employee Amanda Bush. Known as “Tigger” because of her bouncy personality, Bush reportedly did more than merely cheer the Prince on from the sidelines. Also drifting in and out of the Prince’s orbit at this time was Isabella Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe, a direct (albeit illegitimate) descendent of Charles II. (Isabella later acted under
the name Isabella Calthorpe and eventually married Richard Branson’s son Sam, heir to a $6 billion fortune.)

Kate was less frenetic in the romance department. Within weeks of arriving at the university, she fell for a senior named Rupert Finch, the burly, tall, dark-haired star of St. Andrews’s cricket team. Finch was also among those cheering in the audience when Kate loped down the fashion runway in a see-through negligee, but after a year together it was becoming increasingly clear that the clock was about to run out on their romance. He would soon be taking the cricket team on a tour of South Africa, and after that had plans to start work at one of the most prestigious law firms in London.

As alluring as she was that fateful day of the charity fashion show, William already knew there was far more to Kate than met the eye. Even while she was dating Rupert Finch and he was juggling relationships with several young women, the heir to the throne and the flight attendant’s daughter were forging a solid friendship. Soon, Kate was a member in good standing of the Sally’s Boys—the small group of St. Salvatore’s residents who made up the Prince’s inner circle at St. Andrews: Graham Booth, Ali Coutts-Wood, Charlie Nelson, Oli Baker, and William’s Eton pal Fergus Boyd.

Both “sporty” types, Kate and William cycled up and down the beach on weekends and swam laps together almost daily at the Old Course Hotel pool. If the Prince missed a class (she never did), Kate shared her notes with him. There was also the occasional drink at the West Port Bar or Broons, or even a late-night karaoke session at Ma Bells, a loud, knotty pine–paneled student hangout in the lobby of the St. Andrews Golf Hotel.

None of this had been enough, however, to keep both William and Kate from wondering if St. Andrews was the right place for them. During the Christmas break months earlier, they both announced to their respective families that they felt overworked and isolated—and that they wanted to transfer to Edinburgh immediately.

Mark Bolland considered this to be “nothing more than a wobble—a touch of homesickness, entirely normal.” But Prince Charles and the Queen both knew the situation was far from normal. It would not do for William to appear pampered and weak by leaving after a single semester. “He would have been seen as a quitter,” a royal aide told journalist Robert Jobson, “and it would have been an even bigger disaster for the monarchy.”

A deal was quickly hammered out with St. Andrews. Acknowledging that it would also have been a public relations catastrophe for St. Andrews if William left after only one semester, Rector Andrew Neil added that the administration “worked very hard to keep him.” William received counseling and switched his major from art history to geography. “I don’t think I was homesick,” William later conceded. “I was more daunted.” Neil understood completely: “He got the blues, which happens.” Charles sweetened the arrangement by rewarding his son with a $32,000 gold-inlaid hunting rifle.

In truth, Kate was the most important factor in William’s decision to stick it out at St. Andrews. When she expressed doubts to her parents about returning—and explained that William shared those doubts—Carole pointed out how damaging such a departure would be to William’s reputation. Now more than ever, Kate’s mother continued, the Prince needed the support of his friends.

Kate went a step further. She told William that she would join him in trying to make a go of it in dreary, fog-shrouded St. Andrews. If, in the end, he still wanted to leave, Kate promised to follow William out the door. After all, she informed him coyly, “Edinburgh was my first choice.”

The Queen breathed a sigh of relief. For the moment, at least, William did not look like a “whinger” (whiner), and a Scottish crisis of confidence had been averted. Soon, however, Her Majesty’s world would be shaken yet again—this time by the loss of the two women who were closest to her.