William and Harry (9 page)

Racked with grief, Charles locked himself away in his study, and made arrangements over the telephone with Diana’s sisters Sarah and Jane, who would accompany him on the plane to Paris to bring the princess home that night. He was to be driven from Balmoral to Aberdeen before boarding the flight to the French capital. From his window he could see the boys racing their quad bikes. Later that afternoon and during the awful days that followed, Philip would take the boys fishing and they would wade through the River Dee. These seemed like the most normal things in the world and the boys appreciated the distraction. Sometimes they talked, but often they stood in silence, gathering their thoughts and desperately searching for answers that never came.

In London crowds gathered outside Kensington Palace. A sea of flowers already stretched from the wrought-iron gates to the
grassy banks of Kensington Gardens. Many of the mourners had witnessed the wedding sixteen years before and had come to pay their respects to the woman who had captured their hearts.

Back at Buckingham Palace the phone had not stopped ringing. Dickie Arbiter, in charge of coordinating Diana’s homecoming, was with the country’s new prime minister Tony Blair and the world’s press at RAF Northolt awaiting the arrival of a BAe 146 from the Queen’s Flight. At 7 p.m. on 31 August 1997 Diana’s coffin, which had been draped in the yellow and deep maroon of the royal standard, was carried by eight officers from the Queen’s Colour Squadron of the RAF Regiment in the fading light across the tarmac. As the hearse made its way back to London accompanied by a police escort, traffic on the westbound carriage of the A40 stopped all the way back into London. People stood on bridges, walkways and in the roads, their heads bowed as they bid farewell. Candlelit vigils took place outside Kensington Palace as the British public remembered their princess. Charles returned immediately to Balmoral, where he was reunited with his sons.

As the days passed in soft focus, the public mood changed from grief to intrigue and then anger. Where was their monarch and where were the princes? The Queen was in regular contact with Tony Blair in London, where a state funeral was being planned, but had decided it would be best for her family to remain at Balmoral, where the boys were calm and sheltered. It was the first time in her reign that she put her family before duty and it cost her dearly. Not since the abdication had the monarchy been in such crisis. Overcome with grief and shock, the public demanded an explanation, and when the flag at Buckingham Palace was not flown at half-mast there was nearly a revolt. Y
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Daily Mirror
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Daily Mail
. W
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. Those close to the Queen insisted that she
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with her people, two little people who needed her more than anyone else could possibly imagine. But it was not the answer the British public wanted to hear. Opinion polls at the time showed that 70 per cent of the country believed that the Queen’s decision not to come back to London had damaged the monarchy, while a quarter said the institution should go. It was the new fresh-faced prime minister, not the sovereign, who was hailed the nation’s hero, crowning Diana ‘the people’s princess’ in his public address shortly after her death. For once the political leader of the time was more in touch with the British public than the head of state. The crisis was immortalised in a film called
The Queen
starring Helen Mirren. The movie sensationalised events and its suggestion that the Queen considered abdicating was fictitious, but it captured brilliantly the mood of the British public and the crisis of the monarchy.

By the end of the week the Queen had no choice but to bow to public pressure and returned to Kensington Palace on Friday 5 September when she made a television broadcast to the nation. In a breach of royal protocol – usually they are not allowed to fly together – William, Harry and Charles boarded the Queen’s Flight from Balmoral to London that morning. They had been due to visit the Chapel Royal at St James’s Palace to pay their last respects to their mother, but instead they decided to visit Kensington Palace one last time. As they carried out a walkabout in front of the palace’s black and gold gates, William looked to his father for strength. Never more than a foot away, Charles gave a
nod of encouragement without the need to exchange a word. He would later tell his sons how proud he was of their composure. They knew not to wear private grief in public and showed great strength in the face of the wailing and often hysterical public. As the British people watched William and Harry, who clasped his father’s hand tightly as he bravely knelt down to read the handwritten tributes, the tide turned again. In place of anger was pity for the two princes who had tragically lost their mother.

The Queen organised a dinner at Buckingham Palace that night in an attempt to lift the princes’ mood. In truth it was her final attempt to persuade the reluctant William to walk behind his mother’s gun carriage. The fifteen-year-old prince was resolute that he could not face the walk from Kensington Palace to Westminster Abbey. He was not strong enough; there were too many people; he feared he would break down and embarrass his grandmother. ‘It was the duke who persuaded William to walk at the very last minute,’ said Lady Elizabeth Anson. ‘Philip knew that if William didn’t walk he would regret it for the rest of his life. He said to William, “If I walk will you walk?” I think William was overcome with gratitude. He would have done anything for his grandfather, who had been a pillar of strength for him.’

Lieutenant Colonel Sir Malcolm Ross, the master of the household at Clarence House, was informed of the eleventh-hour change of plan and instructed Barnard & Westwood, the Chelsea-based printers who hold the royal warrant, to alter the order of service. They worked through the night, and on the morning of Saturday 6 September William and Harry’s names were there in print, and they were there in person to carry out their first and most tragic joint royal duty.

The best thing for William and Harry, it was decided, was normality. Both boys were back in the classroom four days after they buried their mother at Althorp. There was something comforting about the routine of school, and while William had Dr Gailey to keep a paternal eye on him at Manor House, Gerald Barber was on hand to offer some much-needed support to Harry. ‘Harry had a very tough final year,’ one of his close friends remembered. ‘He was a completely different person when he came back after the summer. He was quieter and far less boisterous. On top of the trauma of losing his mother, he also had the added pressure of having to pass his Common Entrance. He used to have quite a laissez-faire attitude to his studies, but he spent his final year working really hard. His work took his mind off everything else and for once we’d spot Harry in the library. He was lucky he had some real friends there.’ Among them were Thomas van Straubenzee, Charlie Henderson and Ed Birrell.

During those first weeks of term, Diana’s sister Sarah also stepped in to look after the boys. She visited Harry on his thirteenth birthday and took him the PlayStation his mother had bought for him in Paris. Her frequent visits to see the boys
were appreciated as much by Charles as they were by William and Harry. The prince cleared his diary where he could and set aside the weekends for his sons at the expense of spending time with Camilla, who had stopped coming to Highgrove for the time being. Charles had recruited Mark Bolland, a vibrant and radical spin doctor, the year before Diana’s death, and together with Sir Stephen Lamport, Charles’s private secretary, they put in place a plan to resuscitate Charles’s battered public image, doubling his official engagements in the months after Diana’s death. Polls conducted in national newspapers at the time showed that his popularity was at an all-time low and the majority believed he was not fit to be king. Camilla was also vilified for her part in the breakdown of the Waleses’ marriage and cut a desperately lonely figure as she returned to Ray Mill House, the home she had bought in 1995, the same year Camilla’s divorce from her husband had been finalised. Conveniently it was just a thirty-minute drive from Highgrove.

The boys had yet to meet their father’s mistress, and although William had become curious about his father’s female companion, having overheard fragments of his mother’s conversations, Harry had no idea who Camilla was, according to Simone Simmons, who watched a televised debate about the future of the monarchy at Kensington Palace with Diana, William and Harry before the princess’s death. ‘When Camilla’s name was mentioned, Harry piped up and said, “Who’s Camilla?”’ recalled Simone. ‘Diana whisked him up the stairs before he had time to ask any more questions.’

For the time being Charles had no choice but to sideline Camilla, who understood that his number-one priority was his
sons. In November he decided to take Harry on a trip to South Africa with Tiggy and his son’s schoolfriend Charlie Henderson. It was exactly what Harry needed, and he couldn’t stop grinning when he got to meet the Spice Girls at a charity concert with Nelson Mandela. He also accompanied his father on an official visit to Rorke’s Drift. One day, he promised his father, he would also fight for his country. Charles, who had watched his son grow up playing soldiers, had no doubts. When he got back to Ludgrove, Harry was determined to pass his exams. He was young for his class, and had been kept down a year to help him prepare for his Common Entrance. More than anything he wanted to make his mother proud, and he knew how much Diana had wanted him to join William at Eton.

As Harry swotted away ahead of his exams, William was settling into the Michaelmas Half at Eton. He had received hundreds of letters from fellow pupils offering their condolences. ‘When William came back after the summer it was a bit like treading on eggshells,’ said a friend. ‘Of course we wanted to offer our condolences, but it felt strange walking up to him after chapel and saying something. You also sensed William just wanted to forget the awfulness of what had happened. Many of us wrote letters and William was genuinely touched. After a few weeks everything went back to normal and people stopped talking about what was in the papers. William certainly didn’t want to talk about it and we respected that.’

It was a crucial time for the teenage prince, who was studying for his GCSEs. He had a flair for history and enjoyed art, much to his father’s delight. He threw himself into his work and became even more competitive in sports. He swam for the school team
and represented Eton at football and rugby. His hard work paid off and William passed each of his twelve GCSEs with A grades in English, history and languages.

When he turned sixteen, his first birthday without his mother, he agreed to give his first interview. Given his previously tense relationship with the media, which had worsened almost irrevocably since his mother’s death, there was to be no face-to-face meeting. William agreed to answer questions submitted by the Press Association to his father’s aides at St James’s Palace, but he gave little away. He had learned from his mother how dangerous it could be to say too much and was guarded in his responses. He was enjoying Eton, he said, but he did not much like being in the spotlight. Asked what he planned to study at A level, he revealed that he had a keen interest in art and would be taking biology, geography and the history of art, a subject he would fall out of love with years later. For now, however, it remained a passion, and during his A levels Dr Gailey arranged for William to spend a week doing work experience at Christie’s auction house just a stone’s throw from St James’s Palace. William already knew some of the staff, having helped his mother coordinate the sale of her most famous dresses, which had raised £2 million for charity the June before she died. He had come up with the idea to raise money for the homeless, and Diana had thought it a wonderful idea.

On 2 September 1998, thirteen days ahead of his thirteenth birthday, Harry joined his brother at Eton. William, who had become increasingly camera shy, stayed away from the official photocall, leaving his brother and father, who had driven in his Vauxhall estate to Windsor, to greet the waiting media. Once Harry had taken tea with Dr Gailey and his wife Shauna in the
ground-floor dining room of Manor House, where he would have breakfast, lunch and dinner for the next five years, William showed him around the games room and common room, a corridor away in the boys’ living quarters. As one of Eton’s more relaxed housemasters, Dr Gailey had set up a pool table, and allowed the boys to hang posters of their favourite film stars and models on the walls. In the common room, which was adorned with two oversized and rather scruffy sofas and a collection of plastic chairs positioned around a large TV, hung photographs of their peers in school plays and musicals together with trophies and medals they had won. William showed Harry around the locker room, where the F-tits kept their school books and outdoor boots. It was, noted Harry, very exposed and looked straight on to the street.

William was by now well established and popular at the school. He had a close set of friends who he trusted implicitly and who had become something of a second family to him. According to one former pupil William would often walk around the school with plaited hair. ‘His friends would often plait his fringe, which had grown rather long, as a joke. When Robin Janvrin turned up to collect William in the blacked out Range Rover and take him home for the weekend he couldn’t believe the state of him. It wasn’t uncommon for William to be wearing someone else’s pullover. He usually looked a bit of a mess.’ As had become a pattern throughout their school days, Harry depended on his brother to help him make friends. Fortunately there were some familiar faces from Ludgrove, but it was William who helped his brother learn the drill at Manor House and get to grips with his ever-changing timetable. They were allowed to sign out on
Sundays after chapel, when they would walk across the bridge to McDonald’s and catch the latest action movie at the cinema on Windsor High Street. ‘None of us had much money and there wasn’t much to do,’ one of their housemates recalled. ‘We would sometimes sneak to Windsor races, and when we were old enough go to the pub or meet up with some girls from St Mary’s Ascot at a local coffee shop. There was no going out clubbing. We had to be back in our house by 8.15 p.m. on Sunday night otherwise there would be big trouble.’