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

by David Cohen

  Whatever his feelings for Diana were, Charles seemed quite unable to separate from Camilla, but he was in a hurry. Twenty-eight days after he had what might be described as his first ‘date’ with Diana, he proposed to her. The woman he was going to marry included among her ancestors a mistress of Charles II; the woman he loved was the great-granddaughter of Alice Keppel, the mistress of his great-great-grandfather, Edward VII. When the happy couple were interviewed after becoming engaged, Diana said of course she loved Charles. His diffident comment, ‘Whatever love might be’, suggests he was very confused and, besides, it was hardly gallant. Eleanor of Aquitaine would have smacked him, but Diana was too awed, just as Mary of Teck had been. After all, her husband-to-be would one day be King.

  In the end, Charles married Diana feeling he had been pushed into marriage – and with the wrong woman. Before long, he took it out on her, too. The ‘hopeless’ Diana constantly made excuses for him when they got engaged. Before the wedding, she left to see her mother in Australia. She was away for three weeks and her fiancé neither rang her nor returned her phone calls during that time. Whatever love is, it is not that: this seems more like anger.

  The marriage of the century

  Before the wedding, Diana realised the hold that Camilla had on her future husband. It must have terrified her, given the shambles of her own parents’ divorce. Her brother later said that it was only when he got married that he realised the impact his parents’ divorce had had on him. Diana denied the rumour that she had ever seriously contemplated not going through with the marriage, however: she was in love with Charles.

  The amateur Jungian and the Sloane Ranger were married in 1981. While she was saying her vows, Diana reversed the order of Charles’s names, putting Philip in front of Charles. Freud would have had fun analysing the true meaning of that slip. Did Diana’s unconscious have doubts?

  ‘I had tremendous hopes, which were slashed by day two,’ Diana later admitted to Andrew Morton. By then, they were honeymooning on the Royal yacht, Britannia. No one had the sense to suggest that it might not be ideal for two relative strangers to start married life with a hundred sailors for company. Charles also seems to have had his mind more on reading than most new husbands. He arrived with seven books by the insufferable van der Post and proceeded to read them all. ‘My dreams were appalling,’ Diana said. She dreamed of her rival Camilla. Soon after the honeymoon, Diana noticed that Charles was happiest alone with his thoughts – then he did not have to perform or conform. ‘Charles was in awe of his mother and intimidated by his father,’ said Diana, before adding that her husband ‘longs to be patted on his head by his father’.

  I have suggested that in some ways Charles and Diana were an excellent emotional match – both had been left needy after difficult childhoods and soon they discovered one telling bond: neither of them could bear to sleep in total darkness. John B. Watson had the same problem and was sure this was the result of his traumatic childhood, when his father walked out.

  When she became pregnant, Diana suffered from terrible morning sickness. In January 1982, when she was some four months pregnant, she flung herself down the stairs of Buckingham Palace and landed in a heap at the bottom. Charles accused his wife of crying wolf and got ready to go riding.

  The Queen Mother was one of those who saw Diana and was appalled, especially perhaps because she had the wisdom to see that, if Diana was so unhappy during pregnancy, she was likely to suffer from post-natal depression. She herself had seen the damage that could do in her own family.

  Charles turned for help not to his father – who had, after all, grown up among therapists – but to the obsequious van der Post. He told him to send Diana to a Jungian analyst. ‘All the psychologists and analysts you could dream of were trying to sort me out,’ she said later. For a husband to choose his wife’s analyst is, of course, an act of control which no good therapist would be party to.

  The world was waiting for an heir and the young couple did not disappoint. When Diana gave birth to Prince William on 21 June 1982, Charles came out cradling the baby – a touching photo. But there is also a photograph of William and the family taken a few days later at the Palace with van der Post in the back row. He continued to play an unhelpful part. Having had endless nannies, Diana insisted on being far more of a hands-on mother than most aristocrats. William did have a nanny, but his mother insisted that he would not ‘be hidden upstairs with a governess’. Though she adored her son, Diana suffered severe post-natal depression.

  Eventually, Diana saw Maurice Lipsedge, a psychiatrist who was not pushed on her by van der Post. Lipsedge had made his name by showing that immigrants tended to be hospitalised more than one might expect for mental illness. Diana said that, when she first went to see him, he asked: ‘How many times have you tried to do yourself in?’

  ‘Once a week.’

  Lipsedge promised, perhaps a little rashly, that she would be in much better shape within six months. She stayed on as his patient for rather longer but he helped.

  The marriage recovered enough for Diana to accompany Charles on a six-week tour of Australia and New Zealand. The 1983 tour had a very political purpose – to jolly the Australians into not voting to turn themselves into a Republic. Malcolm Fraser, the Australian Prime Minister, suggested to Diana that she might like William to come along too. It seems likely that Fraser let the Queen know his views. Diana plucked up the courage to ask her if William could accompany her and Charles. Perhaps because she was well aware of the damage that had been caused when she and Philip had left a very young Charles alone for long periods, the Queen agreed. It was a break with royal precedent, and very wise too.

  The couple and their baby were a great success in Australia. Everyone expected the media to lose interest in Diana after the marriage, but the opposite happened. What she said, what she wore, even how she did her hair commanded headlines and much television time. Charles, who had been used to being in the limelight, was jealous, although he usually joked about it. The ‘hopeless girl’ had become a star, but no one in the royal family praised her any more than Albert and Victoria had praised Bertie after his triumphant tour of America in 1860.

  After Australia, the marriage recovered again. It was important for the succession to be assured, as it would be if Charles and Diana had another child. She became pregnant once more, but the date for Harry’s birth had to be carefully negotiated in light of his father’s commitments, she claimed. ‘We had found a date when Charles could get off his polo pony for me to give birth,’ Diana said waspishly later. Charles has never denied that particular swipe. When Harry was born, Diana stated that Charles had said that he was ‘so disappointed. I thought it would be a girl.’

  A year after Harry was born, the first reports suggesting a marriage in crisis appeared and, by 1987. The People wrote of a ‘blazing row’ between Diana and Charles. But it was worse than that for the couple moved into separate bedrooms; soon they were leading separate lives. Diana, who had had issues with eating before, started to suffer from bulimia.

  Around 1985, when she stopped seeing Lipsedge, Diana was treated by the psychotherapist Susie Orbach, author of Fat is a Feminist Issue. Photographers lurked outside Orbach’s house to snap the Princess. The Daily Mail pointed out that Orbach, whose father had been a Labour MP, was left wing and ‘hated the traditional family’. Orbach now lives with the novelist Jeanette Winterson. I knew Orbach from my childhood and tried to persuade her, after Diana died, to discuss a little of what had happened in the therapeutic sessions. Orbach told me that she would not ever reveal a scintilla.

  Diana’s aims as a mother made sense in light of her own history. Of her sons she said: ‘I want to bring them up with security and not to anticipate things because they will be disappointed.’ She added: ‘I hug my children to death.’ It seems likely that they needed comfort because few children remain unaffected when their parents’ marriage is failing.

  Diana had experiences other Princesses had never had a
nd did things they had never done. For example, she often went shopping with her children and tried to persuade the boys not to eat things that were bad for them; she also tried to ‘choose health foods for the boys’ tea. Diana made sure that neither of her sons was assigned a personal footman, as Charles had been when he was three. She herself bought their clothes and added, ‘I have to buy two of everything otherwise they squabble.’ She also read to them the same books that millions of parents read to their children – Winnie the Pooh, Babar The Elephant and many others that she had loved during her own childhood. Diana’s friend and former flatmate, Carolyn Bartholomew, admired the fact that Diana and Charles were aware of the differences between William and Harry and were ‘proud of William’s self-confidence and independence and are equally proud of Harry’s thoughtfulness and gentle nature’.

  Therapy made Diana willing to talk publicly about her own problems, which marked a sharp break with royal precedent. She opened a number of conferences on eating disorders and described the feelings she had had as a child as ‘guilt, self-revulsion and low personal self-esteem, creating a compulsion to dissolve like Disprin and disappear’.

  Diana was a loyal supporter of the work of Broadmoor, Britain’s oldest asylum for the criminally insane, which houses some of the country’s most dangerous men and women. Ronnie Kray was a patient for ten years and the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, has been there for over twenty-five years. Diana visited the hospital many times, often without it becoming public knowledge. To the terror of Alan Franey, then the hospital’s general manager, she insisted on talking to patients on her own. Franey told me she had considerable rapport with them. The experience of her parents’ divorce had perhaps shaped, and sharpened, her emotional intelligence.

  The body of Princess Alice

  While the Queen and Prince Philip were trying to cope with their son’s disintegrating marriage, they faced a reminder of Philip’s troubled past. His mother had come to England in 1967, when the Colonels staged a coup in Greece. Alice said she wished to be buried in Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, near to her literally sainted aunt, Ella. When her daughter complained that it would be too far away for them to visit her grave, Alice jested: ‘Nonsense, there’s a perfectly good bus service!’ Nineteen years after she died in 1969, Alice’s body was still in Windsor, though. Transporting a body is not hard so long as you can pay £4,000 and you can contact efficient funeral directors, which is hardly beyond the royals. Alice did not have her wishes honoured, however, until 3 August 1988.

  When she was buried, the Israeli authorities’ memory was jogged but, again, rather slowly. Six years later, Alice’s two surviving children – Prince Philip and Princess George of Hanover – went to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, to witness a ceremony honouring her as one ‘Righteous among the Gentiles’ for having hidden the Cohens. Prince Philip said: ‘I suspect that it never occurred to her that her action was in any way special. She was a person with a deep religious faith, and she would have considered it to be a perfectly natural human reaction to help fellow beings in distress.’

  The publication of Andrew Morton’s book Diana: Her True Story made it clear her marriage was beyond saving – partly, as Diana saw it, because of the influence of the courtiers who protected Charles, and because of Charles’s relationship with Camilla. Seven months after the book appeared, the Prime Minister, John Major, told the House of Commons that the couple were to separate. By then, no one was surprised. The Queen said that 1992 was her annus horribilis, echoing Hugh Dalton, the son of Canon Dalton, who had said that 1947 was an annus horrendus for the British people.

  When Diana and Charles separated, public sympathy was largely on her side, just as it had been with Caroline against George IV. In 1994, Anna Pasternak’s Princess in Love revealed Diana’s affair with James Hewitt, an army officer who was also not a bad polo player. It was only after Hewitt that she became involved with men who were radically different from Charles, such as the heart surgeon Hasnat Khan. Despite this, Diana somehow remained untouched. She did not forewarn the Queen or the Palace of her famous television interview with Martin Bashir on BBC’s Panorama in November 1995. In it, she gave a stunning performance, being both verbally and emotionally assured. She had committed adultery, but was that surprising as there had been three people in the marriage, making it rather crowded? She also criticised the royal family for not supporting her and wondered if Charles really wanted ‘the top job’.

  Diana projected the picture she intended: that of a woman who had been betrayed and had discovered herself with the help of therapy. Although the mother of a future king, she herself would never be Queen, but she said that she hoped to be ‘a Queen in people’s hearts’. The huge audience concluded that Charles was to blame for the failure of the marriage. She, not he, came across as the doting parent. The divorce negotiations were bitter – one unnecessary humiliation was stripping Diana of her title as Her Royal Highness.

  The day the divorce was finalised, Diana went to open the new premises for the Ballet Rambert. I had by then written a book on body language and GMTV asked me to observe and comment on the Princess’s body language. Never before had I been a member of the royal press pack. I was astounded. There were perhaps 300 reporters, photographers and cameramen all scrabbling to get the best angles. Many came with ladders on which to stand. For any person to be something of a ‘good-enough parent’ in such circumstances was quite an achievement. Anthony Holden, the author of two generous biographies of Prince Charles, told me he had to contrast Diana’s courtesy with her husband’s rudeness: Charles had never thanked him for his work, but, after Holden wrote a piece in support of Diana, she arranged to meet him at her favourite restaurant. The Princes were also there. Holden was charmed by her, and by them.

  No one knew at the time that Diana was deeply in love with the heart surgeon Hasnat Khan. She went to Pakistan to see his family but they rebuffed her because they did not want their son to marry a divorced woman. A few weeks after the relationship broke up, the owner of Harrods, Mohamed al-Fayed, invited Diana and the Princes to spend some time on his yacht in St Tropez. She accepted partly because he could provide security for herself and her children. By then, Diana was saying she wanted to live abroad: ‘Any sane person would have left long ago, but I cannot. I have my sons.’ William was now fifteen years old and his mother was pleased that her children were protective: ‘My boys are urging me continually to leave the country; they say it is the only way. They want me to live abroad. I sit in London all the time and I am abused and followed wherever I go. I cannot win.’

  In St Tropez, Diana met Dodi al-Fayed. There has been endless speculation as to whether or not it was a serious affair for her. The Princes had always been due to return before the end of the holiday to join their father in Scotland, and they did so. After they left, Diana and Dodi flew to Sardinia and on to Paris, where they booked into the bridal suite at the Ritz, owned by al-Fayed. The intriguing question of where they were going at 10 p.m. when the Mercedes belonging to the Ritz crashed in the Alma Tunnel has never been finally resolved. The way back to the apartment owned by al-Fayed was not through the Alma Tunnel. It has been suggested that they were on their way to a business meeting as someone was offering Dodi a share in a new nightclub and he wanted to show off his new girlfriend. The matter of where Henri Paul, the driver of the Mercedes, was between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. has also never been resolved. At 10 p.m. Paul was called back to the Ritz to drive the couple. He was said to be drunk, but I found video evidence that, sixty minutes before taking Diana and Dodi to their unknown destination, he managed to squat on his haunches and tie his shoelaces. Such perfect balance is hard to manage if one is drunk.

  Those like David Aaronovitch who argue that there was no conspiracy have never explained where Diana and Dodi were going on the night of 30 August 1997.

  When Diana died, Charles behaved emotionally and with dignity. The Prince of Wales flew to Paris to collect her body
and insisted the royal standard be placed on her coffin. He seemed very sad, but then, when she first met him, Diana had been struck by how sad he looked.

  At the funeral, Diana’s sons walked slowly behind the coffin, very young but very controlled. Since her death, they have consistently talked of their warm memories of their mother. Prince William wishes his mother had met Kate Middleton, the woman he married on 29 April 2011: ‘I’m just sad she’s never going to get a chance to meet Kate,’ he said.

  Charles was now a single father – and a single father in an awkward position. His sons knew that he wanted to marry the woman who had caused their mother so much distress. There is no doubt that he tried more than ever before to be a good father but his own childhood had hardly equipped him for the task.

  Knowing the truth about contemporary royal relationships is virtually impossible, but, fifteen years after Diana died, it seems that Charles and his sons get on well. We don’t yet know what kinds of fathers Charles and Diana’s sons will make – nor how much their mother will influence them. Both William and Harry remain devoted to her memory. When, and if, either of her sons has a daughter, it will be surprising if she is not called Diana.

  Conclusions

  At the end of this long history, one should try to draw modest conclusions at least. Children have to learn about boundaries and one of the problems royal children face is that these boundaries change because their status changes. One of the most poignant moments in Shakespeare is when Prince Hal, who had gone drinking – and probably whoring – with Falstaff, denies him and says: ‘I know thee not, old man.’ The man who beat the future Edward VIII when he was a little boy eventually became his charge’s valet. Princess Margaret often insisted on being called ‘Her Royal Highness’ in the most informal of situations. Charles was given a footman when he was three and that footman was told to call him by his Christian name. We do not know, however, at what point the footman was ordered to revert to protocol and address the Prince as ‘Your Royal Highness’. I would argue that some royal children get confused by such changes – what we are called is central to our sense of identity – and, in the future, they should at least have the confusion explained to them.