Prince William

by Penny Junor

  Such moments were uncomfortable for everyone, but the sarcastic remarks weren’t reserved for the Prince. Members of the Household often found themselves in the firing line too. As one of them said, ‘I would have given up all the flowers, all the niceness if only we could have avoided the sheer bloody-minded sarcasm, the silences, and sending to Coventry that went with it.’

  It was a lottery what kind of mood both bosses would be in. The Prince, always demanding but normally friendly, polite and businesslike, was prone to unnerving temper tantrums. They quickly passed and although he didn’t always apologise, he thought no more about it. The Princess was deadlier. In a good mood, she was a veritable angel and couldn’t do enough to help people, be they strangers, staff, family or friends. She would send their mothers flowers on their birthdays, give them presents and open her heart to them. That could turn on a sixpence, and if she got it into her head that someone was plotting against her, or being disloyal, or she simply no longer liked having them around, they found themselves out in the cold; cut dead. Members of staff lost their jobs, friends were cut adrift without a word and even her own mother endured long periods of estrangement from Diana.

  Arguably, the only people Diana consistently loved were William and Harry. She would repeatedly say, ‘They mean everything to me.’ Her love for them was almost obsessive and it was possessive; as if she was afraid that if she didn’t demonstrate it, with treats and hugs, or verbalise it, they might not be aware of it. She couldn’t leave them to be quietly confident of her love for them, as they were of their father’s. Another of her favourite phrases to the children was, ‘Who loves you most?’ She told her biographer Andrew Morton: ‘I want to bring them up with security, not to anticipate things because they will be disappointed. That’s made my own life so much easier. I hug my children to death and get into bed with them at night. I always feed them love and affection. It’s so important.’

  No one knew better than she how painful and upsetting it had been for her as a child to see her mother cry when her parents’ marriage disintegrated; and to hear her brother call out for their absent mother in the night. She knew precisely how sad and insecure it made her feel.

  Yet now she was a mother, she seemed unconcerned that William and Harry should see her tears and witness her distress – in just the same way as she had witnessed her own mother’s. William, being older, was more aware, and almost took on a parenting role. She spoke about running into her bathroom in tears one day, after an altercation with Charles over the Duke and Duchess of York’s separation, and William pushing paper tissues under the closed door, saying, ‘I hate to see you sad.’ William was only ten.

  The reality was Diana was not always as warm and demonstrative in private as she was in public – and she wasn’t the only one who handed out the laughter and the hugs. Away from the cameras, the boys saw the extremes of her moods as clearly as everyone else and were often quite frightened and bewildered by them. When a friend once suggested it was unwise to have hysterics in front of Prince William, who was then in a cot, Diana said he was too young to notice, and anyway, he would ‘have to learn the truth sooner or later’.

  Her attitude to their learning the truth was much the same when it came to her lovers. Several men had come and gone from her life after Harry’s birth, but there was one, James Hewitt, whom she seems to have loved very deeply. During the five years of the affair, he was part of William and Harry’s lives too. Hewitt was a charming, good-looking young officer in the Life Guards, one of the regiments that form the Household Cavalry, which traditionally guards the Sovereign and the Royal Household. He was a brilliant horseman and, as it turned out, a first-class cad, but their affair lasted longer than any other.

  They first met in a corridor when she flirtatiously admired his uniform. They met again at a party in St James’s Palace in 1986 when she asked whether he would teach her to ride. Riding lessons at his Windsor barracks swiftly turned into a love affair, and he later revealed that she seduced him. As she confessed so publicly on Panorama, it was all true. ‘Yes, I adored him. Yes, I was in love with him. But I was very let down.’

  During their affair he was a frequent visitor at Kensington Palace but also at Highgrove, when the Prince was away. Diana would invite him for weekend parties and allot him a bedroom across the corridor from her own, where she slept in a four-poster bed. Once everyone else was asleep, he would creep into her bed for the night, returning to his room before the rest of the house was awake. This ruse fooled no one, except perhaps William and Harry, who slept in the nursery above. Like their mother, they thought the world of Hewitt. He represented everything that small boys admire. He took them to his barracks and dressed them in little army uniforms he had specially made and let them climb all over the tanks and other armoured vehicles at Windsor. He joined in pillow fights and read them their favourite bedtime stories. He gave them riding lessons on their ponies, and took them and Diana to stay with his mother at her home in Devon.

  He always insisted he hadn’t tried to take the place of their father, but he evidently bonded with them and both boys seemed to enjoy their time with him. Maybe what they enjoyed, subliminally, was seeing their mother happy.

  When he went to the Gulf in 1991, after Britain’s invasion of Iraq, Diana wrote him long, loving letters, which could so easily have fallen into the wrong hands. She watched the TV news avidly, with Harry beside her, fearful that he might be killed. When he returned home safe the following year and grew ever more besotted with her, she ended it in her usual way by refusing to take his calls.

  In what Diana saw as a devastating betrayal of trust, Hewitt wrote a book, Love and War, about their affair when it was over. He had been cut to the quick when she ended it, but recalled the happy times he’d spent with William and Harry and said they had ‘appeared to have the time of their lives.’

  Hewitt was a redhead like Harry and a rumour persisted in the wake of the affair that Harry was Hewitt’s son. It was untrue – he and Diana didn’t meet until Harry was two years old – yet it persisted and there are some who still ask the question today. Dates aside, Harry has the Spencer family colouring and his father’s and grandfather’s green eyes. He is a Windsor through and through – or, as Diana used to call him, ‘My little Spencer’.

  Their father turned a blind eye to what was going on. As he wrote in one letter, ‘I don’t want to spy on her or interfere in her life in any way.’ But she didn’t have the monopoly on love towards their sons. He had been brought up to keep his emotions hidden from public display but it didn’t mean he didn’t have those emotions or couldn’t show them.

  Away from the cameras, he was every bit as loving as Diana, but in a different way. He would fool around with the boys, kick a football and have a rough and tumble. They share the same silly sense of humour and are great practical jokers, as Diana was too – also talented mimics. They loved going to polo matches with their father or to follow the hunt. They also loved watching him shoot, and were not yet in their teens when they first picked up a gun themselves, taught by the gillie at Balmoral, Willie Potts, from whom they also learnt to cast for salmon. Charles built them a massive tree house in a holly tree at Highgrove, wittily known as Holyroodhouse, after the Palace of Holyroodhouse, the Queen’s official residence in Edinburgh. But as well as the Boy’s Own stuff, they weren’t afraid to hug and kiss – even in their teens.

  Charles never invited Camilla to the house when the boys were there, but William, at least, as the elder and Diana’s confidant, will have known about her existence. Her name was never far from Diana’s lips – she called her ‘The Rottweiler’ – and it was frequently accompanied by vitriol or by tears. It was a lot for a child to handle.

  Even if his parents had tried to remain civil in front of him and his brother, it would have been impossible for two such sensitive children not to have sensed the tension and notice the absences. Even the press noticed those. At the end of the summer of 1987, one newspaper calculated that C
harles and Diana had spent one day together in six weeks.

  They had long stopped sleeping in the same room. They saw their own friends, did their own things and lived largely separate lives. The only times they came together and affected a show of unity were at family gatherings that Diana couldn’t get out of, joint engagements and the children’s school events – most memorably the Wetherby’s sports days where, for a couple of years running, Diana triumphed in the mother’s race. Having kicked off her high heels and run like a gazelle, she made Charles look churlish and stuffy as she badgered him to run with the fathers, only to demonstrate what he knew at the outset, that running was not his forte.

  Yet during these years in the mid- to late-1980s, when their private lives were so disastrous, they were in many ways a formidable double act.

  The Prince had established himself as a controversial figure and although some people were bemused by his stance on various issues from architecture to complementary medicine, many of his speeches had struck a chord with the public, as the hundreds of letters that arrived in his office made clear. The Prince’s Trust had begun to see impressive results in helping young people make a start in life; he was busily importing ideas from America to help solve inner-city problems through his involvement with Business in the Community, and he was making big waves on the environmental front.

  Diana, meanwhile, looking ever more glamorous and delighting the fashion industry, was making it clear that she had more to offer than her looks. She had taken on unglamorous causes like drug abuse, marriage guidance and AIDS, and was proving to be quite unparalleled in her ability to charm, communicate and empathise with ordinary people.

  Abroad, they were a sensation on every trip – in Australia, America, the Gulf States, Italy, Japan, the reception was rapturous. At home the combination was never more successful than as joint patrons of the Wishing Well Appeal for Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital. The target was £30 million in two years and in well under that time, they had helped raise £54 million with a further £30 million promised by the government.

  No one saw what went on behind closed doors, and those that did, who knew that both Charles and Diana were seeing other people, never thought for a moment that this might imperil the marriage. Okay, it wasn’t happy, but it wasn’t the first aristocratic marriage to find a way of accommodating differences.

  At that time, Charles had an office in St James’s Palace but he had no press office of his own and relied on the team at Buckingham Palace. Their concern was how to manage the runaway success of the royal couple. They felt the need to pace it; not to allow too much exposure, not to allow them to give too many interviews, not to let too much light in on the mystery of monarchy. They were well aware that members of the Royal Family were not like normal celebrities, whose popularity would wax and wane. They had to keep the popularity going for a very long time, maybe twenty or thirty years. Unlike politics or show business or any other career in which fame and popularity are a measure of success, the monarchy is a long-term game. There is no stepping out of public life when the going gets tough, no retreating into anonymity or even retiring at sixty. The work goes on remorselessly and the exposure with it, and as every celebrity knows, the greater the adulation, the faster it can disappear. The danger was if they had too much too quickly they wouldn’t be able to sustain it.

  It is the dilemma that William’s team grapples with today.

  A GIANT SLEEPOVER

  William was eight when he started boarding school at Ludgrove, on 11 September 1990. Both parents were there to deliver him in a show of family unity, and the media were there in force to record it, but in reality they had come from different directions. Diana had driven William to Wokingham from London; Charles had travelled up from Gloucestershire. They rendezvoused down the road from the school, and drove the last mile or so together in the Prince’s Bentley. They were greeted by the headmasters, Gerald Barber and Nichol Marston, and Gerald’s wife, Janet.

  Whatever their differences, they were united in their choice of school for William, and it couldn’t have been a more successful one. Ludgrove was as close to a home environment as a school could be. It was a small, family-run private preparatory school in the Berkshire countryside, set in 120 acres, with everything boys between the ages of eight and thirteen could possibly dream of. There has been a tradition of two headmasters working in tandem with their wives. Simon Barber and his wife Sophie and Sid and Olly Inglis are in post today and running it along much the same lines as Simon’s grandfather did when he moved the school from Cockfosters to the present site in 1937.

  It was not a homely environment by accident. Their view is that home is the best place for a small boy to be, but every child has to be educated, so why not educate them in an atmosphere that feels as much like home as possible? As Simon Barber says, ‘Yes, some miss home but when they’re busy, all together, all doing the same thing, full boarding, they have such fun. And if they are homesick, there’s a massive support network from their own peer group and the adult population.’

  William was homesick, like many children leaving the nest for the first time, and found it hard to settle. He was also anxious about the rows at home and the uncertainty, but there were mortal fears as well. His father had recently had a bad fall on the polo field and been rushed to hospital with his arm badly broken in several places. After a second long and complicated operation, Diana had taken William and his brother to visit him at the hospital. It was a shock to see his strong and dependable father in a hospital bed. His anxiety about his father aside, William was leaving the calm of the nursery and everything that was familiar to him, and leaving his mother too, while knowing of her unhappy state and just how much she would miss him. Every day she wrote loving notes to her ‘Darling Wombat’, which he kept safely locked inside his tuck box.

  The Barbers were aware of the situation and while treating him no differently from the other boys in their care, they kept a particularly watchful eye. Janet is a naturally warm and affectionate woman and was like a mother to everyone; she referred to them as ‘my boys’ – and when she meets an old Ludgrovian today, of whatever age, she still thinks of him as one of hers. She had an encyclopaedic memory – as did her husband – and knew everything about each one of them. She was quick to notice if something was amiss or if a boy was unhappy; and if something was wrong, she quickly stepped in to sort things out or to support and help him through it, just as she would for her own son.

  Boys come to the school at eight and for the next five years build friendships and support systems that last a lifetime. The Barbers liken the eight-year-olds to a collection of stones with edges that are thrown into a bag together. Their aim is to round off the edges so that by the time the boys move on to their next schools at thirteen, the stones all sit comfortably together. Empathy and tolerance are what they aim for, teaching the boys to get on with one another and to notice when someone is unwell or feeling down.

  This nurturing environment is particularly valuable when home life is volatile. As Simon explains, ‘The continuity offers wonderful stability for the few from broken homes. They know where they are, they come back every Sunday with everybody else. They haven’t got the concern about what’s going on at home because they can immerse themselves in what’s going on here. It can be easier to be here than at home with all the anguish.’

  It was, as one child remarked, ‘Like having a giant sleepover.’

  There is certainly no shortage of fun things to do. The school has a nine-hole golf course, cricket pitches and practice nets, football pitches, squash courts, Eton fives courts, four tennis courts and a swimming pool. There is a music block, a sports hall, and the old milking parlour houses ceramics, art and carpentry. The pupils make camps and dens in the woods, and in the summer sleep out occasionally on the golf course and have sing-songs around the camp fire. For budding horticulturalists, there are little plots where each boy can grow his own flowers or vegetables. And to remind the boys that t
here is a world outside, newspapers are delivered daily and current affairs discussed every morning with a test every Saturday. There were many occasions during those years when the Barbers had to pretend the papers hadn’t been delivered – they didn’t want William to see the stories of Charles and Diana’s failing marriage that filled the front pages.

  One memorable story involved William himself. A group of boys had been playing around on the putting green when one of them swung his club and accidentally hit William on the head. He was briefly concussed and, according to one of the boys, he fell to the ground with blood pouring from a gash in his head. His detective went into a spin. The last bit of the story is certainly true. The school nurse carried William to the main building and planned to take him to the sanatorium and send for the doctor. His PPO stepped in and insisted that an ambulance be called, which it duly was, and William was taken to the local Accident and Emergency Department at the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading. Diana was having lunch at San Lorenzo, one of her favourite restaurants in London, when she heard the news; Charles was at Highgrove and said of that moment, ‘My heart went cold.’ Both of them dashed down the motorway to meet at the hospital. By the time they arrived, William was sitting up in bed looking one hundred per cent. ‘He was chatting away,’ said Charles. ‘Then I knew he was going to be all right.’

  The doctors, however, were more guarded, and decided to transfer him to a special brain unit at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children. Diana travelled with William in the ambulance; Charles followed in his Aston Martin, which his mother had given him as a twenty-first birthday present and which William borrowed on the day of his wedding.

  Tests showed that William had a depressed fracture of the skull, and later that evening he had an operation to relieve the pressure on his brain and to check for bone splinters. Diana stayed at the hospital and held his hand as he went under the general anaesthetic. Charles, having been assured by the surgeons that there was no need for him to stay, went to the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden where he hosted a group of visitors from the European Commission in Brussels. It was a long-standing engagement and he felt, given the surgeon’s assurances, it was unnecessary to cancel.