Prince William Read online

  It was unusual for a first-time mother to leave hospital so soon. Thirty years ago it was common practice to stay for five to eight days after the birth, but Diana’s home circumstances were rather special. As well as daily visits to Kensington Palace from Mr Pinker and Dr Harvey, she had the reassurance of a maternity nurse living in for the first few weeks while she established a routine. Sister Anne Wallace had previously worked for Princess Anne when her two children, Peter and Zara Phillips, were newborn.

  Charles was overjoyed to have a family and quickly mastered the art of bathing the baby and nappy-changing. He had wanted children for years and was always quietly envious of his friends’ cosy domestic arrangements. Just days after the birth he wrote to his cousin Patricia Brabourne, ‘The arrival of our small son has been an astonishing experience and one that has meant more to me than I could ever have imagined. As so often happens in this life, you have to experience something before you are in a true position to understand or appreciate the full meaning of the whole thing. I am so thankful I was beside Diana’s bedside the whole time because by the end of the day I really felt as though I’d shared deeply in the birth and as a result was rewarded by seeing a small creature which belonged to us even though he seemed to belong to everyone else as well! I have never seen such scenes as there were outside the hospital when I left that night – everyone had gone berserk with excitement … Since then we’ve been overwhelmed by people’s reactions and thoroughly humbled. It really is quite extraordinary … I am so pleased you like the idea of Louis being one of William’s names. Oh! How I wish your papa could have lived to see him, but he probably knows anyway …’

  Her papa was Lord Mountbatten of Burma, the Prince’s great-uncle, killed by an IRA bomb while setting out on a fishing trip off the coast of Ireland in August 1979. Patricia had also been in the boat, as had her twin fourteen-year-old sons, her husband, her mother-in-law and a local boy. Only she, her husband and one of the twins survived, all with terrible injuries. Mountbatten was the Prince’s ‘Honorary Grandfather’; he had been a mentor and friend and closer than any other member of his family; closer perhaps than anybody at all. His murder in such appalling circumstances had left the Prince completely grief-stricken.

  It was almost a year after his death that Charles met Lady Diana Spencer, as she then was, at the house of mutual friends near Petworth in Sussex. He had just had a dramatic bust-up with Anna Wallace, the latest in a string of girlfriends, some more suitable than others. It was July 1980. They had met a few times before, but until that evening, Charles had never seen Diana as a possible girlfriend; she was, after all, twelve years younger than him, and when they’d first met he had been going out with her elder sister, Sarah. It was at Althorp, the Spencer family home in Northamptonshire, and Diana was a fourteen-year-old home from school. She was now nineteen, and while their hosts tended the barbecue, she and Charles sat side by side on a hay bale chatting. Charles brought up the subject of Mountbatten’s murder.

  ‘You looked so sad when you walked up the aisle at Lord Mountbatten’s funeral,’ she said. ‘It was the most tragic thing I’ve ever seen. My heart bled for you when I watched. I thought, “It’s wrong, you’re lonely – you should be with somebody to look after you.”’

  Her words touched him deeply. He was lonely; he had lost the only person he felt understood him, the man who had been grandfather, great uncle, father, brother and friend. He had struggled so hard to hide his emotions on the day of the funeral, knowing how much his father disapproved of tears in a man.

  On the evening he heard the news, he wrote in his journal, ‘Life has to go on, I suppose, but this afternoon I must confess I wanted it to stop. I felt supremely useless and powerless …

  ‘I have lost someone infinitely special in my life; someone who showed enormous affection, who told me unpleasant things I didn’t particularly want to hear, who gave praise where it was due as well as criticism; someone to whom I knew I could confide anything and from whom I would receive the wisest of counsel and advice.’

  It was ironic that Diana’s sensitivity about Mountbatten was what triggered Charles’s interest in her as a future bride, since the old man would almost certainly have counselled against the match. He would have applauded Diana’s sweet nature, her youth, her beauty, her nobility and her virginity (important for an heir to the throne at that time), but he would have seen that the pair had too little in common to sustain a happy marriage.

  He might also have seen that, despite the laughter and the charm, she had been damaged by her painful start in life, that she was vulnerable and needy. And he might have recognised that the Prince, with his own vulnerability and insecurity, would be the wrong person to cope with such a complex personality.

  In his absence, there was no one who could offer advice of such a personal yet practical nature. His relationship with his parents had never been sufficiently close. There is no question that they loved their eldest son, but theirs is a family of poor communicators with a surprising dearth of emotional intelligence. He was brought up by nannies and had minimal contact with his parents, who were away for long periods during his childhood. As a little boy, there were occasions, friends remember, when his mother would sit Charles on her knee at teatime and play games with him, but she didn’t spend hours in the nursery (intimidated, they say, by the authoritarian nanny), and signs of overt affection stopped altogether as he grew older. His father was equally sparing with his affection. He was rough with Charles, baffled by a child who was so emotional and sensitive. According to witnesses, he often reduced him to tears. As a result, Charles was frightened of his father and desperate to please him, but was always left feeling that he was a disappointment.

  Mountbatten, older, perhaps wiser, and with time on his hands in his retirement, saw that his great-nephew was in need of help and took the teenager under his wing for some much-needed understanding and direction. He criticised him on occasion, most notably for his selfishness, but he also made him feel he was loved and valued – something his parents had never managed to achieve. Where his father had cut him down, no doubt in an effort to make a man of him in the traditional mould, Mountbatten built up his confidence, listened to his doubts and fears. He rebuked him when he felt he had behaved badly, but overall he provided encouragement and praise. He was a sounding board for some of his more outlandish ideas, and a shoulder to cry on when things went wrong. He had been, in short, a good parent to Charles and his death was devastating.

  Charles was lost and rudderless without him. He knew he had a duty to find a wife and to produce an heir, but his love life was a mess. He had pursued and fallen for a series of women, but the one he really loved and felt comfortable with was Camilla Parker Bowles. He had first fallen in love with her in the early 1970s when he was in the Navy, and her long-term boyfriend, Andrew, was stationed in Germany. She was then Camilla Shand and they enjoyed a happy time together but he felt he was too young and too uncertain to suggest marriage. When she announced her engagement to Andrew, just a few months after Charles took to the high seas, she broke his heart. He wrote forlornly to Mountbatten that it seemed cruel that ‘such a blissful, peaceful and mutually happy relationship’ should have lasted no longer than six months. ‘I suppose the feeling of emptiness will pass eventually,’ he added.

  Her marriage, however, proved less than perfect and, while her husband pursued his Army career and other women, she was left alone in the country with their two children. Charles and Camilla’s friendship resumed. It was still mutually rewarding, but it could never progress to anything more. The Prince of Wales had been weaned on the story of the abdication and how the previous Prince of Wales’ obsession with Wallace Simpson, a twice-divorced American, had wreaked mayhem and nearly brought the monarchy to its knees. Camilla would always be close to his heart but he knew he had to find love and a wife elsewhere.

  Less than seven months after their conversation on the hay bale, when Diana had touched him with her concern and empathy,
Charles asked her to marry him. The amount of time they had spent alone during that period was minimal; they scarcely knew each other, but his hand had been forced by the combination of the press and poor communication.

  He invited Diana to join him and his friends and family at Balmoral Castle, the Queen’s home in the Highlands of Scotland, where they traditionally stay during the summer. She was sweet and unsophisticated, bubbly and funny and everyone at the Castle that summer adored her. She was unlike anyone he had ever known and her interests and enthusiasms seemed to match his own.

  She seemed like the answer to his prayers. Someone he could love, who was young enough to have no sexual past for the press to rake through, who would understand his world and be the perfect partner with whom to face the future. She was from the very top drawer of British aristocracy; as her father said at the time, ‘The average family wouldn’t know what hit them if their daughter married the future King … But some of my family go back to the Saxons – so that sort of thing’s not a bit new to me … Diana had to marry somebody and I’ve known and worked for the Queen since Diana was a baby.’

  What he didn’t mention was that four of his Spencer ancestors were mistresses to English Kings in the seventeenth century; three to Charles II and one to James II, and the beautiful Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, daughter of the 1st Earl Spencer, was the talk of the nation in the eighteenth century and counted the future George IV among her many conquests.

  While the women of the family frolicked with Kings and Princes, the Spencer men became courtiers, and Althorp, the family estate in Northamptonshire, must have had more royal visitors over the centuries than any other private house in Britain. Spencers have lived there since 1486, accumulating a fortune, historically from sheep farming, and filling it with fabulous works of art. It is now home to the 9th Earl, Diana’s brother, Charles, to whom the Queen is godmother.

  Johnny Spencer, then Viscount Althorp, had been an equerry to both George VI and the Queen before his marriage in the 1950s. He was educated at Eton and Sandhurst and until he moved to Northamptonshire on his father’s death in 1975, he had rented a house from the Queen on the Sandringham estate, in Norfolk, where Diana lived until the age of fourteen. Park House was just across the park from the big house, and sometimes Diana and Prince Andrew, who were contemporaries, played together during the Royal Family’s regular stay at Sandringham over the New Year. There were links on her mother’s side of the family too. Her maternal grandmother, Ruth, Lady Fermoy, was a friend and ladyin-waiting to Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.

  On paper she was the perfect match, but in reality the vulnerable Diana was anything but perfect as a bride to one of the most complex men in the country.

  BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

  Diana’s father was thirty-two when he married Frances Roche. She was eighteen; while her ancestry couldn’t compete with his for nobility, and is positively murky in patches, it did add a little colour to the picture, as well as some Scottish, Irish and American blood. The royal connection was comparatively new. Diana’s grandfather, Maurice, the 4th Baron Fermoy, became friendly with George V’s second son, Bertie, then Duke of York, when he and his wife moved to Norfolk. They played tennis together and their wives shared a passion for music; Ruth Fermoy, née Gill, an Aberdeen girl, was an exceptionally gifted pianist who’d been studying at the Paris Conservatoire under Alfred Cortot when they met. They moved from house to house in Norfolk until George V offered them Park House on the Sandringham estate (where Johnny and Frances later lived). Thus the Fermoys and the Yorks became neighbours and the friendship was sealed.

  Frances was born there on the day George V died in 1936. It’s said that the news of her arrival was rushed across the park to Sandringham House where he lay gravely ill and that Queen Mary told him of her birth before he died that evening. When Bertie acceded as George VI after the abdication of his elder brother, Edward VIII, the friendship continued. During the war, Bertie and Maurice used to play ice hockey together against visiting American and Canadian troops on the frozen lakes at Sandringham, and Maurice was out hare shooting with Bertie the day before the King died in February 1952. After Maurice died three years later, Ruth became a lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother, and they remained close until Ruth’s death in 1993.

  Johnny and Frances met at her coming-out ball at Londonderry House in Park Lane. He was supposedly already engaged to Lady Anne Coke of Holkham Hall, eldest daughter of the Earl and Countess of Leicester, and there was a sharp intake of breath in aristocratic drawing rooms when he ditched her for Frances Roche. The Queen is said to have tried to distract him by taking him with her on a tour of Australia for six months as Master of the Household, but after seeing the daily flow of letters between them, she gave him permission to go home and prepare for the wedding.

  They married in Westminster Abbey in 1954. It was the society wedding of the year, attended by fifteen hundred guests, including the Queen, the Queen Mother, Prince Philip and Princess Margaret. ‘You are making an addition to the home life of your country,’ the Bishop of Norwich had declared prophetically, ‘on which above all others, our national life depends.’ Who could have guessed that their fourth child would be the mother of a future King?

  Their first child, Sarah, was born in Northampton in March 1955, nine months after the wedding, and was christened in Westminster Abbey with the Queen Mother as one of her godparents. They had started out in a rented house in Rodmarton near Cirencester, where Johnny was studying at the Royal Agricultural College, but by the time Sarah was born they were living in a cottage on his father’s estate at Althorp. His father was a difficult man, and it didn’t help that Frances refused to kowtow to him. It was a relief all round when, after the death of Lord Fermoy later that year, Ruth suggested that Frances and Johnny take over Park House. It was a large family home with ten bedrooms, extended servants’ quarters and garages.

  Their second daughter, Jane, was born in King’s Lynn in 1957, and this time the Duke of Kent was a godfather. Two years later Frances was pregnant again and, on 12 January 1960, gave birth to a boy – the all-important son and heir – in her bedroom at Park House. They named him John but, tragically, he lived for only ten hours.

  Frances plunged into depression after her baby’s death. Her marriage had not turned out to be the blissful union she had imagined. Johnny, who, as an older man, had seemed the embodiment of sophistication and excitement, had settled comfortably into monotony and middle age, while she was still just twenty-four, full of sparkle and wanting more from life.

  More to the point, behind closed doors he was not the mild, kindly gentleman that his wide circle of friends and neighbours thought they knew. To them he was affectionate and witty, an entertaining addition to any gathering. In the privacy of his own home, he was altogether more physical and frightening. His mother, Cynthia, had put up with years of abuse from the 7th Earl and Frances endured the same. It clearly ran in the family.

  Today there are refuges for women who are victims of domestic violence and the subject is often spoken about, but even today those women, even if they do seek help, often choose to stay with their abuser, believing that in some way they are to blame. In 1960, there was no help to be had and no real understanding of the scale or severity of the problem. Had she been able to confide in anyone, they would probably not have believed her; not have believed that such a thing was possible in a man so well bred and so well connected.

  So Frances continued to live with Johnny and to keep trying for the boy that she knew he so desperately wanted.

  Later that year she became pregnant again, and on Saturday 1 July 1961, Diana was born at Park House. She weighed 7 lb 12 oz and was hailed by her father as ‘a perfect physical specimen’. She was christened at Sandringham church and was, ironically, the only Spencer child not to have a royal godparent.

  In May 1964, the long-awaited boy arrived. The relief and excitement were palpable, and at Althorp flags flew in celebration. Charles was christen
ed in grand style in Westminster Abbey, with the Queen a godmother.

  Diana was not quite three when Charles was born. She was a happy little girl, secure in the cosy routine of nursery life. But in later years, she looked back and convinced herself that her own birth had been nothing but an inconvenience. Her parents had longed for a boy; ergo, she was unwanted. It was a belief that ate away at her and which she could find no reason to refute.

  Life at Park House was typical for a family of their social standing. There were fewer staff now, but they knew their boundaries and the cook would no more change a nappy nor the nanny boil an egg than they would step uninvited beyond the swing door that separated staff from family.

  The children lived in the nursery wing consisting of three bedrooms, a bathroom and a large nursery, all on the first floor. Their upbringing was very traditional and as a result they were scrupulously polite and well mannered. A governess came to teach them every morning and in the afternoons they went for a walk in the park or to tea with the children of neighbouring families or shopping in the nearby village with their mother.

  There were bicycles and a pony called Romany and their birthdays were always celebrated with parties for their friends; and the Spencer fireworks display on 5 November was a great event in the social calendar. All the local children came and Johnny, as master of ceremonies, let off an arsenal of rockets, whizzers, bangers and squibs, while everyone warmed themselves with sausages around the bonfire.