Game of Crowns: Elizabeth, Camilla, Kate, and the Throne (26 page)

Their life in St. Andrews was now more serene, private, and cosseted than ever. But William’s bar-hopping, binge-drinking forays into London—where he usually joined forces with his hard-partying brother—were another matter. When British tabloids ran photos of the drunken princes openly groping women at bars in central London, Carole called her daughter to reassure her that the stories were probably blown out of proportion. But if Kate wanted to spend more time with William in London, Carole also made it clear that the Middletons’ Chelsea flat was at her disposal. “Carole was afraid,” said a Goldsmith cousin, “that he was losing interest and slipping right through Kate’s fingers.”

Heeding her mother’s sage advice, Kate made sure that she accompanied William on trips to Edinburgh and especially into London. In the VIP rooms at places like Chinawhite, Boujis, or Purple, Kate was, in the words of a Boujis waitress, “positively glued to the Prince. If any girl even tried to flirt with him—well, if looks could kill . . .”

NO ONE APPRECIATED KATE’S GUMPTION
more than Camilla, who became serious about staking her permanent claim on the Prince long before their nuptials. Starting back in 2002, when the Queen’s trusted treasurer Sir Michael Peat became Prince Charles’s private secretary, Camilla ramped up her efforts to be publicly seen and accepted as the next sovereign’s rightful life companion.

Even as she promoted an image of herself in the media as a
guileless, garden-tending matron, Camilla furiously battled senior courtiers behind the scenes. According to former members of the Prince of Wales’s staff, she spent hours strategizing with spin doctors, leaking self-aggrandizing stories to the press, sniping at perceived foes, and currying favor with the Crown. “Despite her carefully cultivated image as the comfortable countrywoman,” Patrick Jephson said, “Mrs. PB operates a high-powered PR strategy.”

As far as Camilla was concerned, the small slights added up. When Charles attended a community event in Derbyshire to mark Shrove Tuesday, he was pointedly informed the invitation did not extend to Camilla. Later, the Prince of Wales was asked to attend a Shakespeare tribute evening at London’s Globe Theater for his charity, the Prince’s Trust—and again, she was omitted. This time, she showed up anyway.

Before their marriage, at a celebrity-packed Fashion Rocks gala at London’s Albert Hall honoring Charles, Camilla materialized at his side. Again, she had made the bold decision to defy the Prince’s own senior staffers, who feared the unpopular Mrs. PB would be an unwelcome distraction at a time when Charles needed as much goodwill as he could muster.

Such bitter rows between Camilla and Charles’s inner circle of seven top advisors (out of the Prince of Wales’s total staff of 125) were common. Diana had called the St. James’s crew who catered to her husband “The Enemy.” Now that Camilla had essentially replaced Diana, she called her husband’s advisors—yes, “The Enemy.” (Camilla had a special nickname for her nemesis Sir Michael Peat: “The Bidet, because you know what it’s called, you just don’t know what it’s for.”)

Camilla kept a close eye on those farther down the food chain
as well. Secretaries and clerks, housekeepers and bodyguards—anyone employed in the service of the Prince of Wales was subject to Camilla’s whim. Women she felt threatened by were, for obvious reasons, particularly vulnerable. Sarah Goodhall had been answering Prince Charles’s correspondence for more than a decade when Camilla arranged for her to be invited for a week’s vacation at Birkhall. Camilla was careful to sit next to the thirty-four-year-old secretary at dinner and engage her in conversation about everything from their shared love of horses to their cancer-stricken mothers.

Once Goodhall returned to the office, however, things were very different. Camilla had complained to Goodhall’s superior, Mark Bolland, that the staffer had been too flirtatious with Prince Charles. “Camilla had made it clear she did not want me working there,” Goodhall said.

Similarly, Camilla eased Tiggy Legge-Bourke out of the picture, as well as several other female employees she felt might pose a threat to her relationship with the Prince. As in every other area, when it came hiring and firing staff Camilla had the upper hand. “Prince Charles,” Goodhall said, “is not strong enough to say no to Camilla.”

“The ambition that has brought Camilla this far has not died,” observed Jephson, who accused Camilla of routinely “trampling on underlings” and continually leaking stories to the press to serve her own purposes. “Camilla is deliberately orchestrating events and setting the media agenda.”

Now that the Prince of Wales was well into his fifties, it seemed to everyone who knew him that he needed Camilla more than ever. “Every sinew of his organization and every shred of royal dignity,” Jephson said, had been “subordinated to the task of getting
her into his life.” Now that she was, “the whole apparatus, instead of being dismantled, is being refueled and rearmed to get her on to the throne.” In the meantime, Camilla’s modus operandi was, Jephson went on, “drawn from every shelf of the spin doctor’s medicine cupboard, and from some pretty dark corners, too.”

Camilla reached into those dark corners, according to Jephson, Richard Kay, and others, principally to defame Diana’s memory. “Many of the friends who conspired in Charles’s and Camilla’s extramarital affairs,” Jephson said, “who conceived and executed their mission plan for public acceptability, would happily wish away Diana’s achievements.” Agreed Diana’s friend Vivienne Parry: “It feels like there’s a conspiracy to forget Diana.”

Polls taken just before the wedding of Charles and Camilla showed that 74 percent of all Britons believed that the Queen and other members of the Royal Family had “deliberately avoided” mentioning Diana’s name since her death. Earl Spencer believed that his sister’s memory was being “marginalized” by the Royal Family, and that there was an orchestrated effort to “tell people she never mattered, that in the first week of September 1997 they were all suffering from mass hysteria.” Certainly the Queen and her husband came in for more than their share of criticism on this score. When it was proposed that Heathrow be renamed in Diana’s honor, Elizabeth promptly vetoed the idea. The Queen also nixed a proposal to commission a large statue of Diana to be placed outside Kensington Palace. What the public did not know was that, in both cases, Camilla convinced Charles to lobby his mother against these ideas on the grounds that they were “tasteless.” In determining what was an appropriate memorial for Diana, the Queen relied heavily on Charles’s opinion.

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YET THERE WAS A GROWING
feeling that all the damaging stories about Diana’s emotional instability, her manipulative behavior, and her sordid affairs were part of a larger orchestrated effort to slander the late Princess. The Queen and Prince Philip in particular, said writer Nicholas Davies, were guilty of trying to “besmirch the name and memory of the People’s Princess by leaking and spreading disturbing innuendos that she was mentally ill.”

Camilla was careful to express heartfelt concern for William and Harry every time a once-trusted employee or confidant of Diana’s unleashed another book or tabloid series on the reading public.

Yet in private she gleefully devoured Paul Burrell’s revelations—sold to the
Daily Mirror
for $468,000—about Diana’s obsession with Hasnet Khan (at one point she considering tricking him into marriage by becoming pregnant) and books like
Diana: Closely Guarded Secret
, in which Royal Protection officer Ken Wharfe revealed that Diana always kept a vibrator in her handbag. At home, she called it “le gadget”; packed away in a suitcase whenever she traveled, the vibrator was Diana’s “secret mascot.”

More than once, servants came upon Camilla reading the more titillating passages aloud to friends and then “howling” with laughter. “Every time there was another scandalous story about Diana it was horribly painful for William and Harry,” said one. “They felt terribly betrayed, as you can imagine. But for Camilla, any nasty thing anyone could say or write about Diana was pure gold.”

James Hewitt gave Charles’s mistress plenty to work with when he tried to sell sixty-four steamy love letters from Diana to the
now-defunct
News of the World
for more than $16 million. In several of the letters, Diana referred to Hewitt’s penis as “my friend.”

Indeed, each juicy new tell-all memoir or leaked tidbit “peeled away the layers of the myth until nothing was left,” said a former aide to Prince Charles. “That was the objective—to allow Diana’s memory to be debased to such an extent that Camilla looked good by comparison.”

“People often say that Camilla is such a sweet and uncomplicated woman, but all you have to do is look at how she plots, schemes—the deception,” Lady Elsa Bowker remarked. “She despised Diana in life, and I think even more so in death, because Diana was even more beloved for her kindness in death.”

With Charles’s help—and the benign acquiescence of the Queen—a number of figures in the sovereign’s inner circle were enlisted to join in the Diana-bashing. The Queen’s friend Lady Kennard branded Diana “very damaged” and “impossible to understand.” Another of Her Majesty’s pals and a former lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother, Lady Penn, mentioned that Diana may have suffered some “mental instability.” One of Charles’s closest allies, Countess Mountbatten, chimed in that Diana “had a side the public never saw,” while her sister Lady Pamela Hicks called Diana “spiteful” and “truly unkind.” With a nod to Camilla, Lady Hicks later said Prince Charles had “blossomed” in the years since Diana’s death.

Airbrushing Diana from history entirely would nonetheless prove to be an impossible task. Whatever she said or did behind closed doors, the Queen, who still suffered flashbacks to the days when Diana’s death imperiled the monarchy, was careful to never utter a negative word about her late daughter-in-law in public. At the dedication of the modest Diana Fountain in Hyde Park in July
2004, the Princess’s boys struggled to contain their emotions as the Queen spoke of an England “coming to terms with the loss, united by an extraordinary sense of shock, grief, and sadness.” She went on to praise Diana “especially for the happiness she gave my two grandsons. I cannot forget . . . the Diana who made such an impact on our lives.”

Camilla, of course, had been told not to come. So had Kate, whose romance with William had been out of the bag ever since they were caught just a few months earlier embracing on the slopes at the Swiss ski resort of Klosters.

Shared slights aside, Charles’s wife eyed Kate warily. Even before she married the Prince of Wales, Camilla felt it was perfectly appropriate for her to weigh in on the suitability of William’s women. Now that she was the Duchess of Cornwall (and, although no one dared say it, technically the new Princess of Wales), Charles’s bride had a lofty perspective from her new perch as the second-ranking female in the kingdom.

For his part, Charles harbored no qualms about Kate. Just by shoring up William’s self-confidence during those uncertain early days at St. Andrews, Kate had earned the Prince of Wales’s gratitude and respect. The beautiful young commoner’s eager embrace of the Windsor lifestyle at Sandringham and Balmoral, her ability to withstand the twin pressures of being guarded around the clock and pursued by the press, her wit, style, natural grace, sense of discretion, and seemingly innate unflappability—these were the attributes that set Kate apart.

At Charles’s insistence, Kate was among a small group invited to Highgrove to celebrate the Prince of Wales’s fifty-sixth birthday. Ever the charming hostess, Camilla paid special attention
to Kate that evening, doing her best to make William’s girlfriend feel comfortable and welcome. “Mrs. Parker Bowles,” Kate later told her parents, “couldn’t have been nicer. She’s very warm—a kind of earth mother type, really.”

Appearances were deceiving. Camilla had been closely monitoring William’s love life since his final year at Eton, and actively campaigning for William to marry an aristocrat—ideally someone from one of the royal houses of Europe. Camilla had also used the resources available to her through St. James’s Palace to find out all she could about Kate’s working-class background—from her family’s roots in the coal fields of County Durham through to Kate’s flight attendant mother and the mail-order empire she built as a supplier of children’s party favors.

Camilla was profoundly unimpressed. Based on reports she was getting from mutual friends in Berkshire, Carole Middleton sounded gauche and pushy, lacking in background and breeding. To top it off, Kate’s self-made mother was an unrepentant chain smoker who chewed gum furiously whenever she wasn’t permitted to light up. Since having to give up cigarettes cold turkey to please Charles and the Queen, Camilla had come to view smoking as the nastiest of habits. “Like a lot of ex-smokers,” said a former Highgrove staffer, “she couldn’t stand to see anyone else smoke. She said the smell made her sick. It was rather funny, since she blew smoke in other people’s faces for fifty years.” (Further complicating the issue was the fact that both William and Harry smoked whenever they were out of camera range. Camilla, unwilling to appear as if she were trying to take Diana’s place as a mother figure, refused Charles’s repeated request to talk with the boys about quitting.)

Putting Kate’s up-by-the-bootstraps family background aside, what did Mrs. Parker Bowles think of William’s girlfriend as a person? To Camilla, Kate seemed “pretty, but rather dim.”

“Beneath it all,” says a friend of the Parker Bowleses, “Camilla is a snob. Her family has always moved in royal circles. It’s simply second nature to her. She simply felt Kate and the Middletons were too lowly to marry into the Royal Family.” After waiting more than thirty years to be openly accepted by the Queen, the friend went on, “she wasn’t going to have someone just march in and sort of drag the whole thing down. Like I said, Camilla is really an awful snob.”

She was also someone who had learned to love the limelight. Now that the press had fallen in love with Kate and was pursuing her everywhere, Camilla was apparently jealous of the attention she was getting. “Members of the Royal Family simply cannot stand being upstaged,” Richard Kay said. “Charles hated it when the press trampled over him to get to Diana, and it only makes sense that Camilla resented being eclipsed by a beautiful young woman like Kate Middleton.”