Prince William (15 page)

But first they had to endure a couple of photo calls with their father. Sandy Henney, the Prince's Press Secretary, had promised editors that she would give them good pictures of the Princes and in return they would not use paparazzi shots. She then had the unenviable task of organising the photos: one for the daily papers, the other for the Sundays. ‘The first one, William did not want to do it,' she recalls. ‘It's not true to say that he didn't like the press after his mother died; he didn't like them before that. The three of them were at a particular cabin on the banks of the River Dee and they were going to walk down along the shore. William had his dog, Widgeon, the sister of Hercules, Tiggy's dog. I said, “All you have to do is come down to the shore and walk along. I promise you the press are not going to shout questions – they're too frightened to (joke). All you have to do is throw a couple of stones in the river, or whatever.”

‘The dog saved the day. William was throwing sticks for him and you could see Harry was egging his brother along. The Prince of Wales is just the master because he's lived with it all his life, but the reluctance is there. A week later we did one for the Sunday papers at some weir. I was wracking my brains. So I said to Tiggs, “Have you got any ideas?” And she said, “Christ no, let's go out in one of the jeeps with Harry.” And he was hanging off the back of the jeep like kids do and he said, “I've got a couple of ideas. How about doing this one, this one and this one.” I said, “Not sure that would work, Harry.” “I've got another idea,” so off we go. The third idea was brilliant, it was all Harry's. There was a salmon ladder in the river. “Okay Harry, how are you going to
make this one work?” “Well, William and I can run down here …” and Tiggy's up there with a fag, and Harry's clambering down and I'm thinking, Oh my God, we're about to lose Number Two, and he came up and he said, “Right that's what we're going to do.” And I said, “Well done, Harry, that's going to work. Now you've got to sell it to your father and your brother and bless this kid's heart; what was he, eleven? Coming up twelve? He briefed the Prince, my boss. I had the radio and we were on the other side of the weir with the press and I said, “Right,” to the police, “get them to get out of the car and walk down and Harry will take it from there”; and you could see him directing his father – you couldn't hear because of the noise of the weir – but Harry directed the whole thing and it worked. He was brilliant.'

TRAGEDY IN PARIS

The first call alerting the Royal Family to Diana's accident, less than three weeks after that photo call, came through to Balmoral at one o'clock on the morning of Sunday 31 August 1997. Later that day, William and Harry had been due to fly to London and Tiggy Legge-Bourke had, as the Queen said, ‘by the grace of God,' just arrived to accompany them. The holidays were almost over and Diana was flying back from Paris to spend the last few days with the boys, as she always did before the start of the new term.

The call came through to Sir Robin Janvrin, then the Queen's Deputy Private Secretary, who was fast asleep in his house on the estate. It was from the British ambassador in Paris, who had only sketchy news. There had been a car crash. Dodi Fayed, with whom Diana had been travelling, had been killed, although there was no confirmation. Diana had been injured but no one knew how badly. Their car had smashed into the support pillars of a tunnel under the Seine. It had been travelling at high speed while trying to escape a group of paparazzi in pursuit on motorbikes.

Janvrin immediately woke the Queen and the Prince of Wales in their rooms at the Castle. He then phoned the Prince's Assistant Private Secretary, Nick Archer, who was in another house on the estate, as well as the Queen's equerry and PPOs. They agreed to meet in the offices at the Castle, where they set up an operations room and manned the phones throughout the night.

Meanwhile, in London, the Prince's team were being woken and told the news, ironically, by the tabloid press. The first call to Mark Bolland, the Prince's Deputy Private Secretary, came at the
same time as the Embassy was on to Janvrin. It was from the
News of the World
. Having had a very good dinner, Bolland let the answering machine take the call and it was only when he heard the voice of Stuart Higgins, then editor of the
Sun
, saying something about an accident that he picked up the phone. Higgins had the same story as the Embassy. Higgins then rang Sandy Henney, the Prince's Press Secretary, who had just hosted a 40th birthday dinner for her sister-in-law. His call was closely followed by one from Clive Goodman from the
News of the World
. Bolland alerted Stephen Lamport, the Prince's Private Secretary, and within minutes the lines between London and Scotland were buzzing.

Plans were underway to get the Prince on a flight to Paris as soon as possible to visit Diana in hospital, when the Embassy rang at 3.45 with an update. It was left to Robin Janvrin to ring the Prince and let him know his plans would have to change. ‘Sir, I am very sorry to have to tell you, I've just had the ambassador on the phone. The Princess died a short time ago.' She had sustained terrible chest and head injuries and lost consciousness very soon after the impact and never regained it. She was treated in the wreckage of the Mercedes at the scene for about an hour and was then taken to the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital four miles away, where surgeons fought for a further two hours to save her life, but in vain.

The Prince's first thought was for the children. Should he wake them or let them sleep and tell them in the morning? He was absolutely dreading it, and didn't know what to do for the best. The Queen felt strongly that they should be left to sleep and he took her advice and didn't wake them up until 7.15; but while they were sleeping, he sneaked into the nursery and removed their radios and televisions from their rooms, in case they woke up early and switched one of them on. William had a difficult night's sleep and woke up many times. He knew, he said, that something awful was going to happen.

There was much discussion about how Charles was going to get to Paris to bring home Diana's body. She was no longer a member of the Royal Family, therefore it was not automatic that
a plane of the Queen's Flight should be made available. ‘What would you rather, Ma'am,' asked Robin Janvrin, ‘that she come back in a Harrods' van?' That clinched it: ‘Operation Overlord' went into action, a plan that had been in existence for years but never previously needed – the return of a body of a member of the Royal Family to London. There was a BAe146 plane earmarked for the purpose, which could be airborne at short notice from RAF Northolt.

At 10 a.m. it was in the air with the Prince's London team – Lamport, Bolland and Henney – on its way to Aberdeen, via RAF Wittering in Rutland, where it collected Diana's sisters, Lady Sarah McCorquodale, who lived nearby, and Lady Jane Fellowes. Charles had telephoned Robert Fellowes, who had broken the news to Diana's sisters, and they both wanted to travel with him.

He decided that this was not a trip for the children and so they stayed at Balmoral with Tiggy. When he saw their mother's body, laid out in a coffin which had been flown to Paris earlier in the day, as part of Operation Overlord, he was glad he'd left them behind; it would have been too distressing for them. Paul Burrell, Diana's remaining butler, had flown out earlier and dressed her but her head had been badly damaged in the crash and her face was distorted.

Diana's sisters and Charles stayed with the body for seven minutes. The girls left sobbing; Charles, his eyes red and his face racked with pain, stopped for a moment to compose himself, then, as someone watching remarked, ‘Went from human being to Windsor', as nearly fifty years of training ensured he would. A small crowd was waiting in the corridor, most of them hospital staff whose hands he shook and thanked sincerely for everything they had done. And when he heard that the parents of the sole survivor of the crash, Al Fayed's bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, were at the hospital, he immediately said he must talk to them.

On the flight home, with the coffin draped in the maroon and yellow of the Royal Standard, the Prince wanted to know what arrangements had been made at the other end. It had been an
emotional and moving drive through Paris where thousands of people thronged the streets, their heads bowed in silence. He was told who would be among the welcoming committee at Northolt, which included Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, and that the Princess would be taken to the mortuary in Fulham, commonly used by the Royal Coroner.

The Prince put his foot down. ‘Who decided that?' he said. ‘Nobody asked me. Diana is going to the Chapel Royal at St James's Palace. Sort it. I don't care who has made this decision. She is going to the Chapel Royal.'

It was sorted out in a series of heated telephone conversations from the plane, and when they touched down at Northolt the rest followed seamlessly. Diana's sisters travelled with the body to the Chapel Royal and Charles took a flight back to Balmoral to be with William and Harry.

It was only as the hearse and its entourage crawled down the A40 and into west London that the enormity of what had happened began to dawn on the Palace staff. The motorway, the bridges and embankment – and when those ran out, the roads and pavements – were full of cars and people who had come to watch and weep as Diana's coffin passed by. Tributes had started pouring in from all over the world, and flowers were being laid at the gate of every building with which Diana was associated.

This, they realised, was going to be unlike anything anyone had ever seen before.

THE WEEK THE COUNTRY WAITED

How the Prince of Wales broke the news to his sons and how they reacted will remain between the three of them, though the memory of it will no doubt haunt him until the day he dies. Suffice to say that in a lifetime spent comforting the bereaved and being steadfast in the face of tragedy, nothing could have come close to the pain of that moment. Any parent who has ever had to tell their unsuspecting children that the woman who gave them life will never be coming home will share his pain. Just as any child who has been sat down by a red-eyed, tear-stained father and told their mother is dead will identify with William and Harry. The gut-wrenching shock, the terror, the disbelief, the impossible concept that the mother they adore will never again light up the room with her laughter, never again hold her arms wide for a reassuring hug, never again ruffle their hair … will never again
be
there is too much to absorb.

And for Charles too. For all the difficulties and exasperation and anger he sometimes felt towards his ex-wife, she was the mother of his children and as such he had always loved her and continued to worry about her. They had even started talking civilly again since their divorce, and she had been much more reasonable. She was always in his prayers. His faith runs deep and has always been an important part of his make-up. He will have drawn on it on that terrible day and no doubt used it to comfort his children. He firmly believes in life after death and sees death as ‘the next great journey in our existence'; a mystery and a painful parting but not something to fear. As he once said
at a Macmillan Fund anniversary, ‘The seasons of the year provided for our ancestors a lesson which could not be ignored; that life is surely followed by death, but also that death can be seen as a doorway to renewed life. In Christianity the message is seen in the mystery of resurrection, and in the picture of Christ as a seed dying in the ground in order to produce the new life that supplies bread, and sustenance.'

Diana also believed in life after death. She frequently consulted mediums and clairvoyants; and she was quite certain that her paternal grandmother, Cynthia, Lady Spencer, who had died in 1972 when Diana was a child, kept guard over her in the spirit world.

William, newly confirmed, will also have had his faith to draw on; he too, will have understood that life on earth is just the beginning and that death is no more than a temporary separation from those we love. But no amount of belief can take away the agony of loss, the hollowness, the numbness, the inevitable rewind of last conversations, last thoughts, last memories, the what ifs, the words left unsaid and the guilt.

That morning at Balmoral everyone's focus was on William and Harry and how best to help them get through the day and handle their feelings of loss. They were surrounded by a loving and supportive and probably rather inspirational group of people and both boys were very close to their grandparents. Their grandmother has always found grief difficult to handle, but the Duke of Edinburgh will have been a pillar of strength to them both. His early life was punctuated by loss. By the age of seventeen his mother had been admitted to a mental asylum, his father had virtually disappeared from his life, one of his sisters and her entire family had been killed in a plane crash and his guardian and favourite uncle had died of cancer. For all his bluff exterior, he understood grief.

William said he wanted to go to church ‘to talk to Mummy', and Harry and he were as one, so the Queen took the boys and the rest of the family to the little kirk at Crathie, where she is a regular Sunday morning worshipper while at Balmoral. For those who have been brought up with religion in their lives, as they all
had, there is something deeply comforting in the traditional ritual and language of a church service.

The secular media didn't see it that way. They were outraged that Diana's children should have been taken to church – one newspaper called it a public relations exercise – and they were even more outraged that the minister should have made no mention of the Princess in his prayers. And they blamed the Queen for it. The Reverend Robert Sloan, rightly or wrongly, had decided it might be less upsetting for Diana's sons if he didn't mention her name. ‘My thinking,' he told reporters, ‘was that the children had been wakened just a few hours before and told of their mother's death.' What irked the media the most was that not one member of the Royal Family displayed so much as a wobbling chin on their outing to church.