Prince William (6 page)

The garden swiftly became Charles's passion. He sought the help of a family friend, Lady Salisbury, known as Mollie to her friends (mother of the 7th Marquess), who designed, amongst others, her own garden at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire. She was a legendary plant expert and garden wizard, and was much amused some years later that, having gardened without the use of chemicals since 1948 and been written off as a crank, she was suddenly fashionable. She taught the Prince almost all he knows about landscaping and horticulture and as they dug, plotted, measured and planted side by side, many of her ideas rubbed off on her eager student.

But there was another influence on Charles in his conversion to organics, Miriam Rothschild, a scion of the famous banking family, whose passion for bugs, butterflies and wild flowers was second to none. The influence on the Prince of both women was profound.

The sadness was that while Charles became ever more immersed in his creation, of which in the early days Diana kept a photographic record, Highgrove soon lost its charm for her and she increasingly chose to stay away, preferring to be in London.

DOWN UNDER

Early in 1983, when William was nine months old, Charles and Diana set off for their first foreign tour together – six weeks in Australia and New Zealand. In another break with tradition, they took William with them, prompting stories in the press that they had done so against the Queen's wishes, which was not true. But they did defy the custom that no two heirs to the throne should travel in the same plane together. And so with William, Nanny Barnes, an entourage of twenty staff and a mountain of luggage, the royal party arrived to a rapturous reception.

William, with his own little entourage of Personal Protection Officer, nanny and chef, spent the first four weeks of the trip safely installed on a sheep station called Woomargama in New South Wales, while the rest of the country went into a frenzy that verged on hysteria over ‘Lady Di', and wanted to know every last detail about her infant son. They turned out in their thousands to see her, and as she and Charles zigzagged their way across the Continent, she was treated more like an A-list celebrity than a member of the British Royal Family. Waving flags and clutching gifts, they were desperate to catch her eye, shake her hand, touch her coat, engage her in conversation or in some way feel they had claimed a bit of her; and they were much more vocal and demanding than the Welsh had been when she and Charles toured the Principality the year before.

Once again, it was obvious that Charles was no longer the star. He had never particularly sought the limelight, but like all members of the Family he was used to it, and to find himself
eclipsed after thirty-four years was painful. Proud though he was that so many people seemed to love Diana, he had never expected to play second fiddle to anyone other than the Queen. In Wales, the murmurs of disappointment when the people on one side of the street realised they were getting Charles and not Diana were faint; Down Under, they were unmistakable.

Returning to Woomargama every so often between engagements to see William was a blessed release. As Charles, always a prolific letter-writer, wrote to friends, ‘I still can't get over our luck in finding such an ideal place. We were extremely happy there whenever we were allowed to escape. The great joy was that we were totally alone together.'

To Lady Susan Hussey he wrote, ‘I must tell you that your godson couldn't be in better form. He looks horribly well and is expanding visibly and with frightening rapidity. Today he actually crawled for the first time. We laughed and laughed with sheer, hysterical pleasure and now we can't stop him crawling about everywhere. They pick up the idea very quickly, don't they, when they've managed the first move.'

In New Zealand they all stayed together at Government House in Wellington, where William experienced his first photo call. In the garden, dressed in an embroidered romper suit, with bare legs and feet, he swiftly demonstrated his newfound skill and set off across the carpet that had been laid out for the trio to sit on, stopping only when his father grabbed him. As Charles proudly wrote to his friends the van Cutsems, ‘William now crawls over it [Government House] at high speed knocking everything off the tables and causing unbelievable destruction. He will be walking before long and is the greatest possible fun. You
may
have seen some photographs of him recently when he performed like a true professional in front of the cameras and did everything that could be expected of him. It really is encouraging to be able to provide people with some
nice
jolly news for a change!'

After a polo match the next day, Charles was presented with a miniature polo stick for William. ‘I suspect the first thing he will
do with it is to chew it,' he said, ‘the second thing will be to hit me sharply on the nose but I hope in twenty years' time he will be galloping up this field, with me in a Bath chair on the sideline.'

The pleasures of William aside, it was a long and gruelling tour, and Charles was worried about Diana. She found the crowds terrifying and was exhausted much of the time. In another letter home he wrote, ‘I do feel desperate for Diana. There is no twitch she can make without these ghastly, and I'm quite convinced mindless people photographing it … What has got into them all? Can't they see further than the end of their noses and to what it is doing to her? How can anyone, let alone a twenty-one-year-old, be expected to come out of all this obsessed and crazy attention unscathed?'

Everyone was worried about what the media obsession with Diana was doing to her. There were photographs of her in newspapers almost every day – and often she hadn't even seen the photographer. In one picture she was inside the house at Highgrove, evidently taken with a powerful lens from across the park. Her face had become a money-spinner for them all. An exclusive picture on the front page for any one of them, no matter what the caption, meant a huge hike in circulation for that newspaper. Inside, any story, however trivial, however true, excited comment, but after the initial honeymoon period when Diana could do no wrong, she began to wobble on her pedestal. The columnists that would heap praise on her one day were just as likely to hurl brickbats the next. She read every last word of it obsessively, and was as buoyed up by the praise as she was depressed by the criticism.

Before William's birth, the Queen had taken the unusual step of inviting the newspaper editors to Buckingham Palace, where Michael Shea, her Press Secretary, appealed to them to stop harassing her daughter-in-law and to allow her private life to be private. Diana couldn't go anywhere without being photographed; she couldn't even go to the village shop to buy some wine gums. After the briefing, the editors were ushered into an adjoining room for drinks with the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. The editor of the
News of the World
, who had obviously been pondering on
the matter of the wine gums, asked why Diana hadn't simply sent out a servant to buy them for her. ‘That,' said the Queen, ‘is the most pompous suggestion I've ever heard.'

For a while most of the editors did stop buying the photos that came from the paparazzi, but it didn't stop the commentary and speculation, and it didn't help with Diana's fragile and at times volatile condition.

As William was to discover more than twenty years later, to achieve any kind of real privacy, you had to do more than appeal to the better nature of the press.

A NEW ARRIVAL

Within weeks of returning home from the Antipodes, the Wales family was off again to conquer Canada, this time using the royal yacht
Britannia
as a base. The ‘Lady Di' mania was every bit as alarming as it had been in Australia and New Zealand. While Charles looked ever more dispensable by her side – and collected tributes on her behalf from disappointed fans – she took the country by storm.

Her outfits were more dazzling, she attended more ceremonies, concerts and parades, planted more trees, held more hands and won more hearts. What people seemed to go crazy about, in Canada as much as everywhere else she went, was that she seemed so approachable. No one would have dreamed of lunging forward to touch, far less kiss, the Queen or even Princess Anne, but Diana looked sweetly vulnerable and waif-like and her friendly style struck a chord with the crowds. She did common-sense things, like squatting on her heels to talk to children or to people in wheelchairs so as to be at their level, and if someone dropped something in front of her, she would bend down to retrieve it for them. She had youth, beauty, glamour and a lightness of touch, which had never been seen in the Royal Family before.

It was a winning combination that was rapidly turning her into a superstar that no one in the Royal Household had any idea how to handle. Diana was becoming intoxicated by the adulation. Wherever she went, she was the centre of attention and she could see that with no more than a coquettish tilt of the head or a teasing laugh, men, and women too, fell like ninepins in her thrall. The
adoration of strangers in some curious way made up for the vacuum she felt in real life and in her marriage.

Away from the cameras and the cheering she struggled with feelings of emptiness and depression and her moods continued to swing violently. Having tried everything in his power to help, Charles had run out of ideas and of sympathy. As he felt the chill of being outside the spotlight, the old feelings of insecurity and inadequacy that had haunted his youth came back with a vengeance. He didn't understand what went on inside her head, or what he had done to incite such vitriol. The more he retreated into himself, the more she raged against his absences and lack of concern and the more she convinced herself that his friends were conspiring behind her back.

Her suspicions were completely unfounded, and Charles had spoken to no one about their difficulties, but her obsession ate away at her and corroded what little was left of their relationship. He became uncharacteristically moody and prone to violent outbursts of temper that he unleashed on his most loyal and trusted staff; people like Michael Colborne, who had been with him in the Navy and who had tried so hard to help Diana, were being lambasted for spending too much time with her. Gone was the man Colborne had known in his bachelor years, a man thirsty for life, who was ready to have a go at anything and everything, who worked hard and drove himself hard, but who was fun to be with. The joy seemed to have gone out of his life and the serious side to his nature, which had always been there, appeared to have taken over.

Early the next year Diana became pregnant again, ‘as if by a miracle', she would later say – and on 15 September Prince Harry was born. Charles was again with her throughout, and the next morning brought William to see his new brother. Diana would later say that for six weeks before his birth she and the Prince were closer than they had ever been, or ever would be. ‘Then suddenly as Harry was born it just went bang, our marriage, the whole thing went down the drain.' She claimed it was because Charles was
disappointed the baby was another boy, and a redhead. ‘Something inside me closed off.'

Those around them at the time say that if Charles was disappointed he showed not the slightest trace of it. He appeared to be thrilled to have another son, saying, ‘We almost have a full polo team,' and was again overwhelmed by the miracle of childbirth.

But there was going to be no miracle cure for the marriage. Diana was spared the chronic postnatal depression she had suffered after William's birth, but the bulimia was bad, as were her mood swings, and her demands were increasingly unrealistic. She insisted that Charles spend more time with the children and sent a note to Edward Adeane, their Private Secretary, saying that in future her husband would not be available for meetings in the early mornings or evenings because he would be upstairs in the nursery with William. Adeane, a bachelor with no children, and a courtier of the old school, was dumbfounded. Mornings and evenings were the two moments in their normally hectic day when they had time to go through vital briefings.

As his relationship with Diana deteriorated, the Prince became temperamental and depressed and hugely demanding of everyone around him. He cut back on his engagements and spent many a contemplative hour digging the garden at Highgrove or riding hard, pushing himself physically to the limits. And having cut his closest and oldest friends out of his life, he became isolated in his misery.

The press was quick to notice that he was slowing down. They had calculated that in the same three-month period, Prince Charles had carried out fifteen engagements while Princess Anne had done fifty-six, Prince Philip forty-five and the Queen twenty-eight. Meanwhile he seemed to have plenty of time for polo. They were calling him work-shy and lazy. His father told him to pull his socks up. Prince Philip had no time for the soul-searching his son seemed engaged in and less time for men minding the babies.

Charles, who had been plagued ever since he came out of the Navy by the feeling that he had no real role in life, was becoming
more spiritual and philosophical by the day and his interests were turning towards the alternative and controversial.

This wasn't the first time that he'd stepped outside the royal mould – or found his father unsympathetic. Back in 1972, he had been moved by a radio interview, which opened his eyes to what life was like for young people in deprived areas; many of them turned to crime in the absence of families or other support. Some scribbled thoughts on the back of an envelope about how he might help, and his severance pay from the Navy, formed the basis of the Prince's Trust, which is now the UK's leading youth charity and as mainstream as it is possible to be. It has given a leg-up in life to well over half a million eighteen- to thirty-year-olds, and spawned many other initiatives, but social deprivation is a highly political topic and one, therefore, which is highly controversial for the heir to the throne to be involved in.