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  Kept busy in this way, on the surface the family appeared united, and the children might not have noticed the unhappiness that prevailed beyond the swing door. It must have been a great shock when their mother told them she was leaving home in the autumn of 1967. She explained why but she feared that only the elder children, Sarah and Jane, who had just started boarding school, understood. She had fallen in love with another man, Peter Shand Kydd, and grasped the opportunity to escape her loveless marriage.

  Johnny was also shocked. He was possibly the last person to see it coming, but the staff, who heard the ferocious rows, were not surprised and none of them condemned her – indeed one of the housemaids went with her to London as a cook. Condemnation came from the one person Frances might have looked to for support; her own mother, Ruth. She was a snob and was so appalled that her daughter should leave the son of an earl for a man ‘in trade’ – albeit a millionaire – that the pair didn’t speak to each other for years.

  Initially, Frances took the younger children and their nanny to live with her in London, and she had every expectation that when her divorce came through she would keep them all. But things didn’t go according to plan.

  Peter Shand Kydd was also married with children and his wife soon divorced him for adultery, naming Frances as the other woman. Frances then began proceedings against Johnny on the grounds of cruelty, which he contested and was able to bring as witnesses some of the highest names in the land. Her case collapsed and he divorced her for adultery. In the bitter custody proceedings that followed, Ruth gave evidence against her daughter, claiming Frances was a bad mother. Custody of all four children went to Johnny. Frances was allowed to see them only on specified weekends and for part of the school holidays. She must have been grief-stricken.

  Diana, just six when her mother left, was far too young to understand the complexities of the adult world. In her mind the matter was simple: her mother didn’t want her, therefore she must be worthless.

  ‘It was a very unhappy childhood,’ she told Andrew Morton, the author to whom she famously unburdened herself when her own marriage was falling apart. ‘Always seeing my mother crying … I remember Mummy crying an awful lot and … when we went up for weekends, every Saturday night, standard procedure, she would start crying. “What’s the matter, Mummy?” “Oh, I don’t want you to leave tomorrow.”’

  Another early memory was hearing Charles sobbing in his bed, crying for their mother. She told Morton that she began to think she was a nuisance and then worked out that because she was born after her dead brother, she must have been a huge disappointment to her parents. ‘Both were crazy to have a son and heir and there comes a third daughter. “What a bore, we’re going to have to try again.” I’ve recognised that now. I’ve been aware of it and now I recognise it and that’s fine. I accept it.’

  She learned to accept all kinds of difficult emotions. Shortly before Diana’s fourteenth birthday, her grandfather, the 7th Earl, died and the family was uprooted from Norfolk. She had to leave the comforts of Park House, her friends and everything she had grown up with for the impersonal grandeur and loneliness of a stately home in Northamptonshire, a county nearly a hundred miles away. With the new house came a formidable stepmother. Her father’s marriage in 1976 to Raine, Countess of Dartmouth, the forceful daughter of the romantic novelist Dame Barbara Cartland, caused terrible upset in the family. None of his children liked her and they resented the way she took over Althorp, reorganised it and starting selling off its treasures.

  Three years later her father collapsed in the estate office at Althorp with a massive cerebral haemorrhage that no one expected him to survive. He lay in a coma for four months, while his children awaited the news they dreaded. Just as he was beginning to pull through he developed an abscess on the lung and was again close to death. He was saved by a new drug that Raine discovered in Germany. The Spencer children all acknowledged that she had saved their father’s life, but her conduct did nothing to endear her to them. She guarded him like a hawk during those months in hospital and gave instructions that no one, not even his children, was allowed to see him.

  TRAGIC MISMATCH

  That June evening in 1982, while the first photographs of the day-old Baby Wales were being broadcast on television and the morning newspapers were building their front pages around him, Charles and Diana went home to Kensington Palace full of hope that a baby would work its magic and bring them closer together.

  Their marriage was not yet a year old but already there were serious problems that must have been as distressing as they were apparently insoluble. Within days of announcing their engagement, the Diana who had captivated the Prince of Wales had changed from a happy-go-lucky teenager into a volatile and unpredictable stranger. Charles was mystified and had no idea how to deal with it. The engagement had happened far too early in the relationship – after only a few months – and well before either of them could know whether they were making the right choice. When asked in their televised engagement interview whether they were in love, he had famously and agonisingly said, ‘Whatever in love means,’ while she, quick as a flash, said, ‘Of course!’

  The Royal Family has an important relationship with the media. The institution of monarchy might have disappeared years ago had the media not been interested in the comings and goings of the Family and thereby kept alive the public’s interest. But it is true, nonetheless, that media pressure on Charles to find a bride and the constant intrusion before and after the marriage played a significant part in its breakdown.

  A lot has been written about the Royal couple’s relationship over the years, by me as well as others, and Charles and Diana both gave differing accounts of it, but since it formed the bedrock of William’s childhood, and explains much about the man he is today, it needs to be retold. So does the part the media played in it, because it was the mistakes of thirty years ago that gave William the determination to make sure that when Kate Middleton was no more than a girlfriend, she was spared the worst of what his mother had to endure.

  While staying at Balmoral in the summer of 1980, Diana was spotted by the late veteran royal correspondent, James Whitaker, then working for the Daily Star, whose binoculars were shamelessly trained on Prince Charles while he fished for salmon in the River Dee. Scanning the bank, Whitaker saw a girl he hadn’t seen before, sitting under a tree keeping the Prince company. Whitaker was with his photographer but Diana kept her back to them and neither got a view of her face. All they knew was that Charles had a new girlfriend – and they had a scoop.

  It wasn’t long before they worked out who she was and where she lived, and from that day until the engagement was announced five months later, she had no privacy. Photographers camped outside her flat in Fulham, cameras flashed at her, following her wherever she went. Reporters fired questions at her whenever they saw her; they raked through her rubbish, posed as neighbours, anything to get a scrap of information. She handled it well and at times seemed quite pleased; she said good morning politely to the journalists she recognised, called them by name, and inadvertently posed in a see-through summer skirt at the kindergarten where she worked. It was intrusive, aggressive and at times frightening.

  In the midst of all this there was an incident involving the Prince of Wales on the royal train, which had stopped at sidings in Wiltshire for the night. The Sunday Mirror was tipped off that a blonde woman, matching Diana’s description, had driven up from London, boarded the train and spent the night, the implication being that she had slept with Prince Charles. The paper contacted Diana for confirmation and, although she denied having been there, the editor was so convinced it was true he published the story anyway.

  The result was an immediate and furious reaction from the Queen’s Press Secretary, the late Michael Shea, who normally let inaccuracies, even of this sort, pass. He demanded a retraction, calling the story ‘total fabrication’. A letter to The Times from Diana’s mother soon followed, appealing for an end to it all. ‘In recent w
eeks,’ she wrote, ‘many articles have been labelled “exclusive quotes”, when the plain truth is that my daughter has not spoken the words attributed to her. Fanciful speculation, if it is in good taste, is one thing, but this can be embarrassing. Lies are quite another matter, and by their very nature, hurtful and inexcusable … May I ask the editors of Fleet Street, whether, in the execution of their jobs, they consider it necessary or fair to harass my daughter daily from dawn until well after dusk? Is it fair to ask any human being, regardless of circumstances, to be treated in this way? The freedom of the press was granted by law by public demand, for very good reasons. But when these privileges are abused, can the press command any respect, or expect to be shown any respect?’

  Sixty MPs tabled a motion in the House of Commons ‘deploring the manner in which Lady Diana Spencer is treated by the media’ and ‘calling upon those responsible to have more concern for individual privacy’. Fleet Street editors met senior members of the Press Council to discuss the situation. It was the first time in its twenty-seven-year history that such an extraordinary meeting had been convened, but it did nothing to stop the harassment.

  It was against this backdrop that the Duke of Edinburgh wrote to Charles. He told him he must make up his mind about Diana. It was not fair to keep her dangling on a string. She had been seen without a chaperone at Balmoral and her reputation was in danger of being tarnished. If he was going to marry her he should get on and do it; if not, he should end it.

  If only father and son had been able to discuss the situation face to face, instead of relying on letters, everyone might have been saved years of unhappiness. Charles, mistakenly, took it as an ultimatum to marry and, even though there were serious doubts in his mind about his feelings for Diana, he knew that everyone else seemed to love her, and therefore he did as his father asked. He confessed to a friend that he was in a ‘confused and anxious state of mind’. To another he said, ‘It is just a matter of taking an unusual plunge into some rather unknown circumstances that inevitably disturbs me but I expect it will be the right thing in the end … It all seems ridiculous, because I do very much want to do the right thing for this country and for my family – but I’m terrified sometimes of making a promise and then perhaps living to regret it.’

  He sought the advice of his beloved grandmother, the Queen Mother, who was enthusiastically in favour of the match. She was as enchanted by Diana as everyone else, and she was the granddaughter of her lady-in-waiting, Ruth, Lady Fermoy. The Queen gave no opinion, but almost everyone else whose views he canvassed thought Diana was the ideal bride. The only words of caution were to do with how few interests they had in common, and one friend was worried that Diana was a little bit in love with the idea of becoming a Princess but had no real understanding of what it would entail.

  As Patty Palmer-Tomkinson, one of the Prince’s oldest friends, who was staying at Balmoral with her husband in the summer of 1980, told Jonathan Dimbleby, the Prince’s authorised biographer: ‘We went stalking together, we got hot, we got tired, she fell into a bog, she got covered in mud, laughed her head off, got puce in the face, hair glued to her forehead because it was pouring with rain … she was a sort of wonderful English schoolgirl who was game for anything, naturally young but sweet and clearly determined and enthusiastic about him, very much wanted him.’

  No one who spent time with her during the next six months – not Charles nor any of his friends or family – suspected she was anything other than Patty described, because Diana was good at hiding her feelings and keeping the hurt buried deep inside. No one spotted that she was in any way more complicated than she seemed, far less that she was suffering from any sort of incipient mental illness.

  The people who did know, kept quiet. A month before her death in July 1993, when the marriage was in ruins and their public feuding at its height, Ruth, Lady Fermoy, told the Prince that she had known Diana was ‘a dishonest and difficult’ girl and wished she had screwed up her courage to tell him he shouldn’t marry her. Even Diana’s father, who died in 1991, said before he died that he had been wrong not to say something to warn Charles. They both knew that Diana had been badly affected by the traumas of her childhood and that in marrying her, Charles was taking on an almost impossible task.

  THE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM

  The cracks began to show when Diana was removed from her bustling flat in Fulham, which she shared with three young friends, to a suite of rooms at Buckingham Palace. It must have stirred up memories of the painful move from Park House to Althorp, only this time she was among strangers and it wasn’t so easy to seek out the kitchen staff for company. The contrast could not have been more extreme, and while everyone within the Palace was kind to her, and went out of their way to be helpful, they were no substitute for her teenage girlfriends.

  As one of them said, ‘She went to live at Buckingham Palace and then the tears started. This little thing got so thin. She wasn’t happy, she was suddenly plunged into all this pressure and it was a nightmare for her.’

  ‘Is it all right if I call you Michael, like His Royal Highness does?’ Diana asked Michael Colborne, a friendly father figure who was the Prince’s right-hand man and with whom she shared an office.

  ‘Of course,’ he said.

  ‘Will you call me Diana?’

  ‘No,’ said Colborne. ‘Certainly not. I appreciate what you’ve just said, but if it all works out you’re going to be the Princess of Wales and I’ll have to call you Ma’am then, so we might as well start now.’

  He wasn’t being unkind, he was simply being truthful. She was joining a traditional, formal and hiearchical institution and, however close they came to members of the Family, courtiers never allowed themselves to believe that they were anything other than servants. The adjustment was hard for a young girl who had spent hours sharing confidences with the kitchen staff at Althorp.

  Who knows how she imagined life would be with Charles? She had never watched a couple play happy families. Her role models were probably taken from magazines and the idealised plots of the Barbara Cartland romantic novels she had grown up with. She certainly hadn’t expected that marriage would leave her feeling so lonely.

  But she was marrying a man who was already heavily engaged in royal duties. Almost every day took him to a different part of the country. Immediately after her arrival at Buckingham Palace Charles had left for a five-week foreign tour, organised long before their engagement. His diary was set six months in advance and there was no room for manoeuvre; any cancellation, he knew, meant letting people down and he was too conscientious to even contemplate it. Whatever he might have wanted privately, duty and discipline were second nature to him; he had been brought up to respect both, whereas Diana had never had occasion for either. She was charm personified and had excellent manners – she would have written and sealed a thank-you letter to a dinner party host that same evening before their heads had touched the pillow – but she had never stuck with something that she found hard going.

  Charles was thirty-two years old and he longed for a happy and companionable family life with children that so many of his friends had; but his lifestyle was well established. He worked hard and he played hard – hunting and shooting in the winter, polo and fishing in the summer; he had a close, if curious, family who traditionally spent high days and holidays together; and when he wasn’t working or with family, he had a wide circle of friends whose company he enjoyed.

  He imagined that Diana would fit into his world without his having to change. He assumed that she would like his friends as much as he did, enjoy his country pursuits, share his passion for gardening, opera and old churches and be happy to settle down companionably with a good book and some classical music. He imagined that because she was so young she would easily adapt and fit into everything that royal life demanded.

  But she didn’t. Despite having been brought up in the country, she was only nineteen years old and, not surprisingly, was far happier in the city. She hated horses and h
ad no interest in taking part in field sports. Like most teenage girls she read trashy novels and magazines rather than literature and philosophy; she listened to pop rather than classical music (although she came to appreciate it and always loved ballet) and would much rather have spent a day gossiping over lunch with a friend, shopping or watching a good film than digging and weeding or sitting on a hillside with a sketch pad.

  Charles had little experience of putting himself in other people’s shoes and was surprisingly naive. He didn’t see that Diana might have a problem with his former girlfriend remaining in his circle of friends. As he saw it, he had chosen Diana as the one he wanted to marry and his romantic involvement with Camilla was over. It never crossed his mind that Diana might be suspicious that they were still involved or that he loved Camilla more than her. Finding a gold bracelet he had bought for her on Michael Colborne’s desk was, in Diana’s mind, all the proof she needed. It had a blue enamel disc with the initials GF, which stood for Girl Friday, his nickname for Camilla. Diana was convinced the entwined letters stood for Gladys and Fred, the names she thought they called each other and felt nothing but ‘Rage, rage, rage!’ It was, however, one of several pieces of jewellery he had bought for special friends as a means of saying thank you for having looked after him in his bachelor years.

  Diana told Andrew Morton she had felt like ‘a lamb to the slaughter’ as she walked up the aisle at St Paul’s Cathedral on their wedding day in 1981. Her sisters, Sarah and Jane, have told friends they will always feel guilty for not helping her when she said she wanted to back out at the eleventh hour. Either way, there is no doubt that when the world thought they were witnessing a fairytale and celebrated with abandon, both Charles and Diana knew that something was amiss.