by A. N. Wilson
In 1984, addressing the Royal Institute of British Architects at their Hampton Court dinner to celebrate 150 years of their existence, the Prince spoke for England:
For far too long, it seems to me, some planners and architects have consistently ignored the feelings and wishes of the mass of ordinary people in this country. Perhaps, when you think about it, it is hardly surprising as architects tend to have been trained to design buildings from scratch–to tear down and rebuild. Except in Interior Design courses, students are not taught to rehabilitate, nor do they ever meet the ultimate users of buildings in their training–indeed, they can often go through their whole career without doing so. Consequently, a large number of us have developed a feeling that architects tend to design buildings for the approval of fellow architects and critics, not for the tenants.
He continued, to the dismay of the assembled modernist-brutalist architects, to celebrate the joys of the small garden, the courtyard, the arch; and he lambasted the wreckage of London’s skyline, and singled out the National Gallery extension as ‘like a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend’.3
As with the Prince’s Trust, so in the matter of aesthetics, he put his money where his mouth was. He established the Prince of Wales’s Institute for Architecture to teach students traditional methods of architecture, the Prince of Wales Drawing School to teach draughtsmanship again to a generation who could not find instructors in such basic skills at other art schools. He established summer schools for teachers to explore ways of helping them teach history and literature in schools which had lost touch with both. Throughout this period, in which he took a more and more active role representing the monarch in official engagements at home and abroad, he also ran the Duchy of Cornwall, the chief source of his income, as an enlightened landlord and businessman.
For all these virtues, and for many more, Prince Charles was much admired, and much loved, by hundreds of thousands of British people. He probably always had a much bigger constituency of admirers than any politician. He was a small ‘c’ conservative who, unlike the party of the name, actually believed in conserving things–such as the hunt, such as small rural communities, such as Georgian high streets, and the Book of Common Prayer. In an age of arid secularism, he was a gentle advocate of the spiritual dimension in life; and in a time of increased intolerance, he remembered that he was destined to be not merely the head of the Established Church (were it to survive, which seemed ever less likely) but also the Head of a State which had within it many of no faith, and many of non-Christian religious traditions. It was particularly to Prince Charles’s credit that in a period when Islam was held in dread by the population at large, he spoke with well-informed praise of the Islamic traditions, aesthetic, ethical, intellectual and social.
Surely any country which had such a figure as its Head of State in waiting would rejoice? Not since Prince Albert had there been in the Royal Family a figure who had such public spirit and such a range of talents. And when considered beside the Prime Ministers of Britain in his grown-up lifetime, he towered above them all. But–and the previous paragraphs of encomium have been waiting patiently for an inevitable ‘but’–Prince Charles lived in strange times. One of the features of our times was their ineluctable tendency to turn their events into farce and its dramatis personae, however serious and worthy their intentions, into clowns. It would be churlish to deny a single world of the praise which we have heaped upon Prince Charles and his achievements. Equally, however, it would be sycophantic to suggest that this was the whole story.
At midnight on 30 June 1997, Britain handed back the sovereignty of its large major colony, Hong Kong, to the People’s Republic of China. It was an emblematic moment in history, and it seemed all the more appropriate that it should have been happening after the landslide election victory of New Labour with its thrusting young leader, Tony Blair. The British Governor, Christopher Patten, a former Conservative Cabinet Minister of liberal disposition, had not enjoyed cordial relations with the Chinese. There were fears about the future of the colony, given the human rights record of the Chinese and the comparatively recent massacre (1989) in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. The ceremony itself, the lowering of the flag, with Governor Patten in a feathered hat, and in tears, was one which made it abundantly clear, to anyone who could possibly have doubted it, that the Imperial past was definitely over. Diplomatic niceties had to be observed, but many felt horrified by the murderous old communists taking over what had been the most vibrant capitalist island-economy outside Manhattan. When all the politeness was complete, everyone cheered Prince Charles when his comments on the occasion were leaked. In a letter-diary drafted to over a hundred friends, he described the Chinese tyrant leaders as ‘appalling old waxworks’ who engaged in ‘an awful Soviet-style display’ of goose-stepping at the ceremony. But, alas, these robust and wholly justified comments were spoiled by the ‘round robin’ he wrote to friends, complaining about being seated in business class on the plane. The decision to put him and his entourage in business class was a purely administrative one, designed for his convenience, so that he would not have to share with the much larger contingent of politicians on the plane. He tetchily said that he had ‘noticed his seat was uncomfortable’. Everyone in the Western world knew that business class seats provide luxury beyond the wildest dreams of most inhabitants of this planet. Some of Prince Charles’s subjects could remember from their history books that when Louis XIV was ‘cut for the stone’ (i.e., had a gallstone removed), he did not allow a single squeak to emanate from his royal lips when the surgeon’s knife went in. An attendant lord-in-waiting felt the very faintest twitch of the King’s hand as his insides were gouged out. That is kingly behaviour–not whingeing about seats on aeroplanes.
The contrast between the robust and admirable stance Charles took about the Chinese, and his self-pity over the plane seats, illustrates in miniature why his effectiveness as a communicator, and as a would-be Head of State, was curtailed. It was not simply the malice of newspaper journalists which found something truly extraordinary about Jeremy Paxman’s discovery about Charles and the boiled eggs–namely that when he returned from the hunting field the Prince liked to have seven boiled eggs lined up, in order from runny to hard, so that he can find one which was ‘just right’. It was not possible to imagine Charles’s mother going in for such pampered, silly extravagance.
Paxman observed at the time that Prince Charles has ‘an Eeyoreish quality to him, this awful sense of being beleaguered, unloved and misunderstood. You want to help him–to tell him to snap out of it.’
The tetchy self-pity seemed to attract misfortune from the very first. Bad luck can be seen as something which happens to people, but it is often more properly regarded as a personal characteristic, like bad breath, which actually belongs to the person himself.
It is with both sides of the story in mind–Prince Charles’s high virtues, and his innate tendency to self-pity and self-absorption–that one turns to what will always be seen as the central and most important aspect of his story: his marriage to Lady Diana Spencer. He was thirty-two at the time of the ‘Fairy Tale wedding’ in St Paul’s Cathedral–which took place on Wednesday 29 July 1981.
As all the world would eventually come to learn, Charles was under immense pressure from his parents and their advisers to find a wife. Convention required that she be a virgin, and the law required that she be Protestant–or at least, not a Roman Catholic. (The law did not consider the possibility that the bride of a British sovereign might be Jewish or Muslim.) These requirements severely limited the field. There was, moreover, the awkward fact that Prince Charles was in love with a married woman.
Those members of the Royal Household who have kept as a souvenir Ceremonial: The Marriage of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales with the Lady Diana Spencer must consider it to be a document so heavy with irony that it is as if penned by the Fates. It relates in punctilious and military detail the processional route from B
uckingham Palace to St Paul’s; at what hour the Sovereign’s escort of the Household Cavalry will be in position on the South Side of the Forecourt in Buckingham Palace, which car will be transporting the King and Queen of Spain, and which the Prince and Princess of Liechtenstein; who will walk up the aisle behind The Rt. Hon. The Speaker, at what precise second the State Trumpeters will take up their positions in the portico, when the Earl Spencer will enter the Cathedral with his daughter on his arm, and when the fanfare will be sounded by the State Trumpeters as the Bride and Groom, newly married, enter the Quire from the Dean’s Aisle. Then, there is the whole procession back again to Buckingham Palace for the Wedding Breakfast; the appearance of the Queen and the Bride and Bridegroom on the balcony (1.10 approx). Finally, there is the departure of the pair at 4.00 p.m. (approx). ‘The Bride and Bridegroom will depart from the Grand Entrance in a semi-State Landau, accompanied by a Travelling Escort of the Household Cavalry, under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Andrew Parker Bowles, The Blues and Royals.’4 It was with Colonel Parker Bowles’s wife, Camilla, that Prince Charles was still in love.
Camilla Shand, a year older than the Prince, was the daughter of Major Bruce Shand, the Old Rugbeian son of the much-married architectural historian P. Morton Shand, the man who taught the young John Betjeman (while working with him on the Architectural Review) to admire the modernist works of Gropius and Le Corbusier. Bruce Shand (who won the Military Cross with bar) was in the 12th Royal Lancers (Prince of Wales’s), and saw action during the Second World War in Belgium, France and North Africa. As befitted a cavalry officer, he was a keen horseman, a passion he passed on to his daughter. Camilla’s mother was Rosalind Cubitt, the granddaughter of Alice Keppel, mistress of Edward VII. Legend has it that when Camilla Shand first met the Prince of Wales, at a polo match at Smith’s Lawn in Windsor Great Park in the early summer of 1971, she reminded him of the fact that ‘My great-grandmother was the mistress of your great-great-grandfather.’ In some versions of the story, she added, ‘So how about it?’ When Gyles Brandreth asked her if there was any truth in the story, Camilla pulled a face and laughed, then shook her head.5 Prince Charles’s version of how they met was that they were brought together by one of his former girlfriends from undergraduate days, Lucia Santa Cruz, who thought that Camilla would be ‘just the girl for him’.6
The passion between them was strong, but Charles did not want to commit himself to the relationship, and when he returned to his career in the navy she married Andrew Parker Bowles–on 4 July 1973. It was a marriage which produced two children, but it was interrupted by frequent adultery. When Lord Mountbatten was assassinated in 1979, Prince Charles turned in his grief to his old love, Camilla. The old sea dog would have found nothing strange in Charles seeking consolation with a married woman. He had once told a friend, ‘Edwina and I spent all our married lives getting into other people’s beds.’7
On the evening of the Queen Mother’s eightieth birthday ball at Windsor Castle in 1980, Charles and Camilla spent the entire evening together on the dance floor, causing his date for the evening, ‘Whiplash Wallace’ (Anna Wallace), to exclaim: ‘Don’t ever, ever, ignore me like that again.’
The passion for Camilla remained undimmed a year later when he undertook what was in effect an arranged marriage to Diana Spencer.
When the betrothed pair appeared on television together on 24 February, Charles said, ‘I am positively delighted and frankly amazed that Diana is prepared to take me on.’ When pressed by a BBC interviewer, ‘And in love?’ Diana answered, ‘Of course,’ with a little giggle. Then Charles glossed, ‘Whatever “in love” means.’8
It was an unfortunate bit of thinking aloud, which would be, like police evidence in a criminal case, taken down and used against the Prince of Wales in the years to come. There have since been endless retellings of the story. The traditional version tells of the innocent, virgin Sloane Ranger, daughter of an earl, working as a nursery-school assistant, and head over heels in love, desolated to discover a few days before the wedding that ‘Gladys and Fred’ (pet names given one another by the Prince and Mrs Parker Bowles) are still in love. This was the version fed to the public by the Princess herself in her television interview with Martin Bashir for the BBC programme Panorama. ‘Well, there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.’ A later, very clever piece of Dianology, by Tina Brown.9 posited a variation on the traditional version by suggesting that, at the time of the marriage, Charles had fallen besottedly in love with his young bride, and that it was Diana Spencer herself who was manipulatively determined to become the Princess of Wales, even though she was not in love–‘whatever “in love” means’. Whether the Tina Brown picture, of a young blonde ruthlessly exploiting her sexual attractions and her charismatic personality for the purposes of self-promotion, is accurate, is a matter which future Dianologists will long debate. Perhaps all truly gripping biography entails a measure of self-portraiture.
The story was to end, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say to climax, in a death, on 31 August 1997. Diana, divorced from Charles, was in Paris with Dodi Fayed, the son of the Egyptian owner of Harrods, Mohammed Fayed, also the owner of the Paris Ritz. Fayed père went through the malicious farce, ten years after Diana’s death, of insisting that she had been murdered at the behest of the Duke of Edinburgh, that she was pregnant at the hour of her death, that she was betrothed to his son Dodi. All these fictions had to be tested in an inquest, even though the truth had been established ten years before, by a French inquest: namely that she died as a result of an accident. In order to escape the attentions of the paparazzi, Dodi and Diana escaped from the Ritz and were driven at speed through the Pont d’Alma tunnel. Henri Paul, the driver hired by Fayed, had three times over the legal limit of alcohol in his bloodstream. There was a semi-collision in the underpass with a white Fiat Uno. The car containing Diana and Dodi collided with the side of the tunnel. She was still alive in the back of the car when a passing doctor tried to save her, but she died in La Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital at 4 a.m. on Sunday 31 August 1997.
Did I say this was the end, or the climax of the story? It was the end of her life, but it was far from being the end of the Diana story. Her death, aged thirty-six, was met with a public response in Britain unmatched in our times, even by the death of Sir Winston Churchill. Indeed, it is hard to think of any death which has been received in such a way.
When Churchill died, there was a solemn, silent tribute, with thousands filing past his catafalque in Westminster Hall. A similar solemnity would meet the death of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother in 2002. The death of Diana was quite, quite different.
When the news broke, they streamed into London at a rate of six thousand people per hour.10 Before long, the gates of Kensington Palace were covered with bouquets of flowers, teddy bears, Queen of Hearts playing cards, rosaries, children’s drawings. People came to camp out. There were people in sleeping bags all down the Mall. Makeshift shrines were erected, with candles burning in front of Diana’s picture. The crowds were not quiet in their grief. Howling, sobbing, gasping grief turned into mob hysteria.
Those old conservatives who had always been of the Prince’s Party, and seen Diana as a dangerous, disruptive person, could not understand what was happening and dismissed it as a terrifying nonsense. When the crowds became angry and began to ask why the flag on Buckingham Palace was not flying at half-mast, the conservatives replied that in so far as a flag ever flew over the Palace, it was the royal standard; it was only ever flown when the Queen was in residence (she remained in Balmoral, with Diana’s children) and it was never flown at half-mast. It was a symbol of the enduring monarchy. That was not a sufficient answer for the mob. ‘Show Us You Care’, screeched the Daily Express at the Queen. ‘Your People are Suffering. Speak to us, Ma’am’–the Mirror.
As was shown in the (pretty accurate) film The Queen, in which the monarch was played by Helen Mirren, the court stuffpots were the last to pick up on the pub
lic mood, but Prince Charles had been sensitive to it from the beginning.
The Queen heeded advice, and spoke to the nation on television, with the French window open behind her and the mob more or less audible and visible behind her. When, at the funeral, Diana’s brother Earl Spencer denounced the Royal Family, there was long and continued applause from the crowds outside Westminster Abbey.
In life, Diana had divided the British. To be of the Prince’s Party, so-called, was to hate Britain becoming more touchy-feely; to regard the baring of the soul as an essentially bogus exercise for those who perhaps did not have much soul to bare. It was to see the Prince as a decent man, doing intelligent things to benefit society, rather than being a show-off who behaved like a celebrity queen. It was to deplore the manipulative way in which Diana wooed the media, briefed journalists, and, in the propaganda battle with the Prince, tried to have it both ways–claiming that Mrs Parker Bowles had wrecked her marriage, while herself conducting affairs with a string of ever less suitable partners. To be of the Princess’s Party was to rejoice in her informality, and to feel that it did no harm at all for the British to learn to express their emotions a little more freely. It was also to feel that, while politicians seemed most to worry about the level of inflation and the balance of payments, it did the rest of the population no harm to be reminded that the homeless slept on the streets of London, that drug addiction among the homeless young was spiralling, that AIDS was killing hundreds of people. Nor did it do the military and political bosses any harm to be reminded, as Diana had done in her latter years, of the lunatic cruelty of landmines, which, left in the ground after conflicts were over, remained to deprive civilians all over the world of their limbs.
When he chose to marry her, neither Prince Charles nor Lady Diana Spencer could have known that she possessed the qualities which would electrify the world. Long before rifts between the married pair became apparent, and long before anyone thought of taking sides, she began to wow the crowds.
