Bringing Them Up Royal: How the Royals Raised their Children from 1066 to the Present Day

by David Cohen

  The valet’s perspective

  While still at Cambridge, Charles acquired something few undergraduates have: a personal valet. Stephen Barry, who became Charles’s ‘Jeeves’ in 1970, wrote a book far less astute than Crawford’s, but it still provides many interesting details. He found Charles friendly, ‘but he was always Royal’ and distant. Barry learned never to sit in his presence unless specifically asked to. He had to wake him at 7.50 a.m. Breakfast was nearly always the same, as the Prince liked oats.

  Barry provides nice facts about Charles’s relationship with his mother. If they were both in Buckingham Palace, they would nearly always have dinner together. Charles always visited his mother in her apartments, she never came to his. He often told Barry that the Queen was very wise. When Barry first went to work for him, Charles sometimes said: ‘We will see what happens when I’m in charge’, but later he heard that refrain far less often.

  Prince Philip deferred to the Queen in public, but he made many key family decisions. He often used to tell his son off for being slow and being distracted. Barry adds: ‘Then you could hear his father calling, “Charles – come along” He is always trying to speed him up.’

  ‘Coming, Poppa,’ the Prince would say, according to Barry. Unlike Luis, Barry said nothing about girlfriends. The two polo players kept in touch after Charles left Cambridge and went into the Navy. Luis was now married. He told me that he often fixed Charles up with girls and let the Prince take them back to an attic room in the house belonging to his father-in-law. He played practical jokes, often locking Charles, and whoever the girl was that night, in the room. It was merry, but not that innocent. One of the girls with whom Charles had a fling was also seeing another polo player, who played for England – and also, Luis claimed, Sarah Ferguson’s father, who had a major position in national polo life. All good fun, he smiled, and very much in the spirit of the decadence of the Mountbatten set of thirty years earlier. The girls ‘knew the game,’ Luis added.

  Classic psychoanalytic theory suggests that men who play around are fundamentally hostile towards women and this is often the result of a difficult relationship with their mothers. A Freudian would claim that Luis was being a little naïve: Charles was not looking for the love and hugs he felt he had never had but taking his revenge on his mother’s entire sex. His wife would bear the brunt of this.

  In the course of my research, I also made a second discovery involving the living and the recently dead, which needs to be handled with tact. It concerns post-natal depression – and its victim was not Princess Diana, but a more senior member of the royal family who was treated with ECT by Dr Denis Leigh. Leigh became well known in the 1970s when he was one of many leading psychiatrists to criticise the way the Soviets detained dissidents in mental hospitals. He worked at the Maudsley Hospital in London and eventually chaired the World Psychiatric Association. The ECT episode matters because it should have made the Queen more sympathetic when Diana suffered from post-natal depression.

  13

  Princess Diana as a Mother

  When Charles and Diana married in 1981, the press asked if a Spencer was good enough to marry a Windsor. Her father countered that the more appropriate question was whether a Windsor, recently a Saxe-Coburg-Gotha with Greek trimmings, was good enough to marry a Spencer. Charles himself joked that Diana was rather more English than he was, which is perfectly true. Diana’s father, Johnnie Spencer, was a 32-year-old ex-army officer when he met Frances Roche, whose family held the Fermoy baronetcy; he was also heir to the Spencer name and their wonderful house at Althorp. If Spencer was dinosaur-dyed nobility, the Fermoys were new blood on the block that had made their money in ‘trade’, manufacturing paint. Frances’s mother, Ruth Fermoy, had fought her way into the aristocracy. There is no riche like a nouveau riche and, perhaps, there is no grandee as grand as one whose earlier generations were not grand at all. Ruth Fermoy sometimes behaved in ways that recall Marie Bonaparte’s snobbish grandmother back in the 1890s. Fermoy was a stickler for convention, especially once she had achieved the distinction of being appointed a Lady of the Bedchamber to the Queen Mother. Ruth was delighted when Spencer, who could trace his genes back to John of Gaunt, proposed to her daughter. She was equally delighted when the witnesses to the marriage included the Queen and Prince Philip.

  Spencer had not impressed much in the army. His commanding officer said he was very nice, but very stupid. After leaving, Spencer tried to get work so that he would not have to rely on an allowance from his father. The old boys’ network was supposed to work for ‘chaps’ like him, but, when he asked an old school friend to introduce him to the bankers and stockbrokers Hoare & Son, the friend refused. Spencer had never been any good at maths, he reminded him, which might prove a handicap for a banker. In fact, Spencer did nothing much but look after Althorp when his father died.

  The Spencers were happy at first. Frances gave birth to two daughters but her husband and her mother were desperate for a male heir. Frances’s third child was male but died within hours. The death certificate noted the child ‘died from extensive malformations’. Her husband and mother did not let her see her dead child. Frances minded terribly: it was, she felt, as if the baby she had been carrying for nine months had never existed. Her husband and her mother then behaved more like Henry VIII than people of the 1960s. If Frances wasn’t producing healthy boy babies, something must be wrong with her insides; they sent her to have gynaecological tests. The ordeal was humiliating.

  Despite this, Frances became pregnant again, but she lost the baby. Later, when she revealed the problems in her own marriage, Diana said this obsession with a male heir affected her. She was supposed to be a boy and felt she had disappointed her family, which did nothing for her self-esteem. ‘I was hopeless,’ she often said.

  Diana was born in 1961. Pressure to provide a male heir was not the only pressure in her parents’ marriage: Frances was beginning to find Johnnie Spencer dull, as just about everyone had done for most of his life. When she finally gave him the longed-for male heir, the marriage did not improve. Frances said, in the last three years of their relationship, she and Johnnie drifted apart and neither of them seemed able to do anything about it.

  Memories of early childhood are not necessarily accurate, but Diana remembered often seeing her mother cry and said that her father never explained why. In retrospect, she realised that her parents were always ‘sorting themselves out’ but, in fact, failing to do so.

  The unhappy Frances spent more and more time in London. During one of her visits, she met Peter Shand Kydd, heir to a wallpaper fortune and also the brother-in-law of Lord Lucan, a man whose dissipations rivalled those of Edward VII’s first son, Eddy. Kydd’s marriage was also in trouble, but he did not begin an affair with Frances. In a far more innocent way than among the Mountbattens in the 1930s, the two couples became friends; they all got on well and went on a skiing trip together in 1967 to Courchevel. But, on the slopes and après-ski, Frances and Peter realised that they were strongly attracted to each other and they did something about it after the holiday; being rich has its uses when it comes to adultery. The couple did not have to use hotels – Shand Kydd rented a flat in Belgravia, where he and Frances could meet. In September, someone told Spencer his wife was being unfaithful to him. He was furious and sued for divorce on the grounds of adultery. Frances admitted that, but alleged that he had been guilty of cruelty. The divorce became venomous and there was a betrayal for which there are few modern precedents: Spencer persuaded Ruth Fermoy to take the extraordinary step of giving evidence against her own daughter. It may be that a woman whose family had made its money out of paint could not bear to see her daughter give herself to a man whose family had made its fortune out of wallpaper.

  In the 1960s, divorce was still seen as a disgrace. The records of the case have remained secret, but Frances claimed that her mother alleged her personality was so flawed that she could never be a good parent. Following this, the court gave Spencer custo
dy of the children. This was an extremely unusual decision at the time, especially as Spencer had been a typical upper-class father and knew more about baccarat than bringing up children. For Diana, the divorce was traumatic. ‘The biggest disruption was when Mummy decided to leg it,’ she said.

  Diana’s father approached being the main carer for his children by making life fun for them. He built an outdoor swimming pool and, of course, hired nannies. The nannies had to cope with very unhappy and confused children. Diana and her siblings would stick pins in chairs so the nannies would sit on them and they would sometimes throw the nannies’ clothes out of the window, especially if these young women ‘were seen as a threat’, Diana said. The last phrase suggests the children hoped their parents would get together again, which of course was even less likely to happen if their father flounced off with the help.

  Diana was eight years old when the divorce proceedings started. She was told a judge was going to come and see her at her school – a very unusual proceeding – to ask which of her parents she wanted to live with. In the event, no judge ever came to talk to her. In the chaos, Diana took refuge in pets and started a menagerie. She also became very protective of her younger brother, Charles, who became the first child she looked after.

  One aspect of Diana’s childhood suggests that she already had a slight rebellious streak. Eight-year-old girls whose ancestors included mistresses of Charles II were supposed to be mad about horses. Diana did not show the least interest in riding, though – her passions were tap dancing and ballet.

  After the divorce, Diana’s mother tried to keep in contact with her children, but, like many divorced couples, Frances and her ex-husband were angry and bitter. In 1971, Spencer hired a new nanny, Mary Clarke, who had more patience with the children than her predecessors. Frances found it very painful to see another woman bringing up her children. One incident made matters worse – and again it involved skiing. Frances and Peter were allowed to take the children to Switzerland. When Mary Clarke met them at King’s Cross to deliver the offspring, Diana was holding her arm. According to Frances, she soon discovered that her daughter had broken it and neither her father nor the nanny had noticed. It must be said that they rushed to the slopes rather than to the nearest casualty, but, when the children were handed back, Mary Clarke noticed that: ‘To my surprise I saw Diana’s arm in a sling.’

  The incident gave Frances hope; she saw a chance of getting her children back and instructed solicitors to sue for custody because they were obviously at risk if no one had noticed her daughter had a broken arm. One evening, Spencer asked Mary Clarke to come into his study and, with some embarrassment, read her his ex-wife’s statement. Clarke claims she was shocked by the venom of Frances’s accusations. At the custody hearing, the nanny defended her competence. ‘I wanted no share of the despair of the mother or the jubilation of the father,’ she has said. Clarke convinced the judge and Spencer kept his children, though their mother still saw them.

  It would be hard to imagine family relations could get any more difficult but they did when Spencer fell in love with Raine, daughter of the romantic novelist Barbara Cartland. In 1972, I filmed Barbara Cartland for a documentary on pin-up girls and was amazed by her snobbery. Cartland would not let the cameras roll until we hired the Queen’s make-up lady for her. It cannot be easy to have been her daughter. Raine was certainly not easy with her own stepchildren. She was outrageously rude when she first met them and, in a fine display of manners, belched loudly. Diana laughed, which marked the start of a long and hostile relationship between the two of them.

  Diana did not shine academically; she left school with one a-level. She then took a flat at Coleherne Court in Kensington, which she shared with two girl friends. Diana said that she always had the feeling that she was destined to ‘marry someone in the public eye’. Although she had boyfriends, there was no scurrying back to their beds in some attic – she always kept them at bay. She became an early example of what Ann Barr and Peter York characterised as a ‘Sloane Ranger’, but unlike Sarah Ferguson, who later became her sister-in-law, Diana had no lovers.

  Diana may have left school with hardly any qualifications but she had learned the lessons of her own traumatic childhood well. She was emotionally intelligent in her dealings with children and that probably started when she protected her younger brother during the trauma of their parents’ divorce. The work that Diana did in the brief period before she became engaged to Charles could almost have been designed to help her be a good mother. Many of her informal, part-time jobs after she left school involved looking after young children. In this, she was imitating what many fine child psychologists who had had disturbed childhoods did themselves. Anna Freud became a famous child therapist – Freud himself felt she was too close to him, though he had personally analysed her, something that would now be considered outrageous. When he was ten, John B. Watson, who wrote the bestseller Psychological Care of Infant and Child, saw his father leave home and move in with a Native American woman. Penny Junor has recently argued Diana was not such a good mother, but, in a number of her books, Junor has always sided with Charles. She has produced little persuasive evidence that Diana failed her sons.

  Many people Diana worked for, as a nanny or a teacher of small children, were struck by her rapport with her charges, and her skill. She knew how to play with them and care for them. As a teenager, the Queen Mother had worked with wounded soldiers during the 1914 war and that influenced her attitudes. In a similar way, Diana was changed by her experiences in looking after small children. When she became a mother, she used both her natural talent and what she had learned; no other royal parent had had as much experience of hands-on childcare, with the possible exception of the child-rearing diva, Queen Charlotte.

  The irony is that Charles and Diana should have folded each other into a happy marriage. Both had had difficult childhoods, which left them needy, but it was not to be.

  Charles – the most eligible man in the world

  After Cambridge, Charles joined the Navy as his father had done and was eventually given command of a minesweeper. With Camilla Shand, he was indecisive. By the time Charles realised he wanted to marry her, she had already decided to marry Andrew Parker Bowles after his relationship with Princess Anne ended. It would have been a major break with tradition for the heir to marry a woman who had had other lovers; permissiveness stopped at the palace gates. By the mid-1980s, when Sarah Ferguson married Prince Andrew, some experience for the wife of a Prince was acceptable, as Ann Barr noted in an acute piece in The Observer, but Ferguson’s children had no chance of ever coming close to the throne.

  As we have seen, there was considerable psychiatric history in the royal family and Charles, whose grandmother had spent years in an asylum, had enough humility and insight to look for help. Unfortunately, however, he had got to know Laurens van der Post, who became a major influence on him. Van der Post was a Jungian disciple. Unlike Freud, who for all his many flaws enjoyed a stable and relatively happy marriage, Jung was a sexual adventurer. He had an affair with one of his patients, Sabina Spielrein, and eventually settled into a ménage à trois. Van der Post never managed to stay faithful to his wife for long; given Charles’s all too understandable conflicts about women, he was perhaps not the wisest person to choose as a mentor. He was also a serial liar; his biographer, J. D. F. Jones, complained of this publicly and the book has the waspish title Storyteller.

  In 1977, Charles flew to Kenya with van der Post and the two men disappeared for two weeks. In homage to Jung, together they travelled into an area where, in the 1920s, Jung had lived for nine months – a time when he met a number of witch doctors, meetings he claimed were vital for his spiritual development. Charles came back much more confident, especially in his ideas about alternative medicine.

  Charles’s problems with women and marriage were not helped by the attitude of his ‘honorary grandfather’, Louis Mountbatten. Mountbatten again tried to engineer a royal marriage, this time
between Charles and his real granddaughter, Amanda Knatchbull. Prince Philip also wanted to see his son settle down but Charles, perhaps feeling somewhat railroaded, at least had the sense to delay making any decision.

  On 27 August 1979, Mountbatten went lobster potting and tuna fishing in the Shadow V, which was moored in the harbour at Mullaghmore in the Republic of Ireland. During the night, an IRA man had attached a radio-controlled 23kg (50Ib) bomb to the boat. Soon after Mountbatten came aboard, the bomb was detonated. He was pulled alive from the water by local fishermen, but died before they got him to shore. Lady Brabourne, the 83-year-old mother-in-law of Mountbatten’s daughter, was seriously injured and died the next day. Two teenagers were also killed, including one of Lord Mountbatten’s grandsons. On the same day, the IRA also killed eighteen British soldiers in an ambush at Warrenpoint.

  Charles was devastated. ‘He just looked at me and said very quietly, “What was the point?”’ his valet, Stephen Barry, recalled. Later, he also told Barry how helpless he felt. The man who had been nagging him to marry had been murdered; Charles needed consolation and perhaps needed to honour the old man. It seems plausible that at this point he decided perhaps his elders were right and he should find a wife. He finally proposed to Amanda Knatchbull but she refused him. It has been claimed the violent deaths made her feel she did not want to be a member of the royal family. When he met Diana, he was still recovering from the shock of Mountbatten’s death. She spoke at some length to the biographer Andrew Morton about how she tried to comfort Charles when they first started courting because he was grieving so much. He was needy, but clumsy. The girls Luis had introduced did indeed ‘know the game’ and part of the game was being quick and willing. ‘He was all over me – I thought men were not supposed to be so obvious,’ Diana remembered, but of course she had had no serious boyfriends. ‘I couldn’t handle it emotionally – I was very screwed up,’ she said.