CHARLES WAS BORN in November 1948; and when he became “marriageable,” it was another era, when royal men were expected to marry virgins, women without a past of any sort, sexual or otherwise—blank slates to be cast in a specific and dutiful royal mold.
In 1978, after Charles’s thirtieth birthday came and went and he remained unwed, Prince Philip demanded that his son stop playing the field (or spending time with the married, unsuitable Camilla Parker Bowles) and find an acceptable wife.
The Prince of Wales first met Lady Diana Spencer, the youngest daughter of the 8th Earl Spencer, in 1977 when he was dating her older sister Sarah. Charles recalled Diana as “a very jolly and amusing and attractive sixteen-year-old, full of fun.”
Diana remembered “being a fat, podgy, no makeup, unsmart lady, but I made a lot of noise and he liked that.”
Over the next few years, the royal family, in a clumsy effort at matchmaking, would begin throwing Charles and Diana together. At a house party in July 1980, the pair found themselves seated side by side on a hay bale. When the naturally sentimental Diana moved to console the prince over the death of Lord Mountbatten—his favorite relative and mentor had been assassinated by an IRA bomb—he began to wonder whether Diana was The One.
Not the one who had won his heart, of course, but the one who could become the perfect Princess of Wales.
Then nineteen-year-old Diana was sweet, naive, and photogenic. Plus, she came from a family that was even more aristocratic and had been in England longer than the Windsors. Above all, she was virginal.
After the couple had enjoyed only thirteen “dates,” always in the company of others, on February 24, 1981, Buckingham Palace announced the royal engagement. But there was trouble in paradise from the start. Moments after the announcement, the couple was interviewed by a BBC reporter. In what he surely assumed was a puffball, the journalist asked the duo “And of course in love?”
Wearing a matronly royal blue suit and a white printed blouse with a foulard bow that seemed far too stodgy for a teenager, Diana, standing by her thirty-two-year-old fiancé’s side, immediately replied, “Of course.”
Charles, however, delivered the first of many emotional blows. He added, “Whatever love means.”
Boom.
In the days leading up to their marriage, Diana would discover that Charles had never broken off his relationship with Camilla. She often overheard her fiancé cooing to his mistress over the phone. Three weeks before the big day, Diana considered backing out of the royal wedding.
Her sisters Jane and Sarah teased, “Too late, Dutch”—short for duchess, Diana’s family nickname—“your name’s already on the tea towels.”
Then, on the eve of her nuptials she discovered a diamond bracelet Charles had purchased for Camilla with the initials F and G, for Fred and Gladys, their pet names for each other.
But all her life Diana had dreamed of marrying a prince.
She wanted the fairy tale.
She is even on record as having said, “I knew I had to keep myself tidy for what lay ahead.”
Tidy? What teenager says that? One who knew that retaining her virginity was part of the royal protocol.
LIKE CHARLES, DIANA had grown up in an unloving home. But she was a child of divorce.
Diana’s mother, born Frances Roche, had an American grandmother. Frances’s father, the 4th Baron Fermoy, was the son of New York City socialite Frances Ellen Work, so it’s easy to trace Harry’s streak of Yankee rebelliousness. Miss Work’s family were in the Four Hundred, the social register of New York’s most pedigreed residents—a figure that was (falsely) reputed to have corresponded to the exact number of guests who could fit inside society duenna Mrs. Astor’s Fifth Avenue ballroom. Miss Work wed the 3rd Baron Fermoy in 1880, during America’s Gilded Age when Astors and Vanderbilts and Jeromes looked to unite their fortunes made in stocks and trade to titled English aristocrats on the opposite side of the Atlantic.
In 1967, when Diana was only six, her mother walked out on the family, deserting her husband, John, and their four young children for Australian wallpaper magnate Peter Shand Kydd. They married two years later.
After his wife abandoned the family, Diana’s father Viscount Althorp won custody of their children, but he was often absent as well. In 1975, on the death of his father, he became the 8th Earl Spencer; and the Spencers moved off the Sandringham estate—the royal demesne in Norfolk—to Althorp, the family seat. The following year, he married the divorced Countess of Dartmouth, the former Raine McCorquodale, whom he introduced to his children as a fait accompli.
Diana never bonded with her new stepmother. It was Raine’s mother, the prolific Romance novelist Barbara Cartland, who provided Diana with a means of escape from an unloving home. To the outside world, Diana Spencer was a poor little rich girl who seemed to have everything. In truth, her rose-tinted happiness was an illusion similar to the happily ever afters in all the Cartland novels she devoured.
Barely twenty years old when she wed Charles, Diana may have been naive in many respects, one of them believing that he would eventually fall in love with her, as heroes of romance novels do. Yet she was also ambitious. She wanted to be Princess of Wales.
Still, Diana’s discovery that Charles was communicating with Camilla even during their shipboard honeymoon aboard the royal yacht Britannia sent her into an emotional and psychological tailspin. It was a rocky start to what Diana had hoped would be her happily ever after.
After Prince William was born, the couple grew more distant. Diana suffered a miscarriage in 1983. Then Harry was conceived at Sandringham. Diana hoped her pregnancy would repair the multiple fractures in her marriage.
But the princess suffered dreadful morning sickness, as she had when she was carrying William. Diana was convinced by then that her husband had returned to Camilla’s arms, and claimed that Harry’s conception in itself was a miracle, because by that time her relationship with Charles had become so estranged that they almost never shared the marital four-poster, preferring to sleep apart. Sadly, after Harry was conceived, the Waleses no longer shared a bed at all.
Ken Stronach, who had been Charles’s valet for fifteen years and who was disgusted by the prince’s long-term adultery with Camilla, confirmed that after Harry’s conception, the prince slept on a brass bed in the dressing room of their country house. By then the princess “knew [her husband] had gone back to his lady.”
It had not been enough to wound his wife with an insult about Harry. At the christening, Prince Charles had the tin-eared temerity to share his disenchantment with Diana’s mother, Frances Shand Kydd. “We were so disappointed. We thought it would be a girl.”
Frances immediately defended her daughter. “You should realize how lucky you are to have a child that’s normal,” she retorted, biting Charles’s royal head off.
IT’S A SAFE bet that December 21, 1984, was the first and last time Harry was photographed wearing a lacy dress—a 143-year-old christening gown of Honiton lace that was first worn by one of Queen Victoria’s daughters, and which every royal baby has been christened in ever since. William was upset when he was told that he could not hold his baby brother, but no one trusted the rambunctious child the family had nicknamed “the basher” with a newborn in a fragile antique. Officiating at Harry’s christening in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle was Robert Runcie, Archbishop of Canterbury and principal leader of the Church of England. Another royal tradition: the holy water came from the Jordan River.
That day, the merry and not-so-merry wives of Windsor, including one of Harry’s godmothers, the Queen’s sister Princess Margaret, resembled a floral bouquet, clad in various shades of royal purple and blue with matching hats.
Princess Margaret had been the wild Windsor of her generation, with a legendary, if checkered, romantic history. When she was a teenager, she had fallen in love with her father’s equerry, Group Captain Peter Townsend, a man sixteen years her senior. After Townsend’s wife divorced him, M
argaret and Peter hoped to marry. Theirs was the star-crossed romance of the 1950s. By law, because Margaret was under the age of twenty-five, she required the Queen’s consent to marry. But as the monarch is also the head of the Church of England—a church that didn’t recognize divorce—Elizabeth was morally obligated to refuse her own sister’s request to wed the man she loved. Margaret waited five more years so the matter could go to Parliament; but she ultimately changed her mind about marrying Townsend. One reason might have been their age difference; another might have been that the devoutly religious princess would have been denied a church wedding. Margaret retained her wild streak, however. In 1960, she married a fashion photographer.
WHILE WE THINK of the adult William as the steady, well-behaved one and Harry as the wild child of our era, those personality traits were reversed during their earliest years. Although William was indeed the born organizer, he was also shouting and smashing whatever was in reach, while Harry was, as their mother put it, “more quiet.” Still, he was always eager to copy Wills, cheerfully following his lead, beeping the horn of his red tractor as he chased his older brother through the corridors of Craigowan Lodge, their Scottish retreat a mile from the queen’s beloved Balmoral, crashing into walls and baseboards with such ferocity that they left a trail of paint chips like freshly fallen snow.
Beloved by sovereigns from Victoria to Elizabeth II, Balmoral is a granite castle built in the Scottish baronial style. To visit is to step back in time. The royal estate itself is situated on 50,000 acres of woodlands—green pine forests, pale birch groves—and rolling parklands. Most of the interior, from the carpeting to the drapes to the upholstery, is tartan. Taxidermy hunting trophies and medieval swords and shields line the walls. Afternoon tea is still poured daily from Queen Victoria’s silver teapot, and the royal men dress in kilts, wearing the purple and gray Balmoral tartan; the colors were selected to honor the local flora.
Although Diana missed the urbanity of London and felt suffocated by Balmoral’s rusticity and Victorian traditions, her boys adored it. There Prince Philip was the attentive patriarch he had not been for his own son, patiently teaching the young princes to fish the River Dee, known for its salmon; while Charles was the relaxed paternal figure the public never saw, playing hide-and-seek with his sons, taking long walks with them before the morning mist blew off, hiking the rolling moors of purple heather and the rocky granite outcroppings with Harry hoisted on his shoulders. Although Diana was never fond of horses, during their Scottish holidays the young princes learned to become accomplished riders.
In 1980, Charles purchased Highgrove, a 347-acre estate in Gloucestershire, 120 miles from central London; it became his country retreat, with and without Diana. Built in 1796, Highgrove House also happened to be conveniently located just a few miles from Bolehyde Manor, the Wiltshire home of Camilla Parker Bowles, a detail that was not lost on the Princess of Wales. Diana and Charles had separate bedrooms at Highgrove. Hers was filled with cuddly stuffed toys. In Charles’s room was a well-loved patched bear that he’d carried everywhere since childhood. Perhaps the Prince of Wales would have become a laughingstock if Fleet Street had revealed this; but to many, this Christopher Robin–hood makes him eminently more relatable.
Harry and William spent most of their weekends at Highgrove, which Charles had transformed into an Edenic paradise, working the farm as well as planting exotic species. Spread across the vast acreage was a meadow carpeted with flowers, lush jungle areas, a stumpery made from tree roots, and box hedges clipped into fantastical topiaries. A pair of sculptured cranes built from recycled auto parts presided over a wild lake. Perhaps coolest of all—to two young boys—was a thatched-roof tree house nestled into a holly tree. Charles was keen to teach his sons the merits of organic farming and had given them pint-size gardening tools; but Harry and William were far more interested in jumping into a giant pool filled with plastic colored balls—where their father would enthusiastically dive in after them—or in playing war games in their tree house, dressed in miniature military fatigues. A frequent visitor to Highgrove was Prince Charles’s younger brother Prince Andrew, who had been a helicopter pilot during the Falklands War in 1982. Andrew kept the boys mesmerized with his war stories and piqued their interest in following in his footsteps.
Harry and William had their own nursery (not the botanical variety) with a playroom, sitting room, and bedrooms, where they’d sleep in their striped pajamas, Harry with his thumb in his mouth.
In London, Harry spent his early years in a three-story residence of twenty-eight rooms, Apartments 9 and 10 in the redbrick Kensington Palace, amid 374 acres of landscaped gardens and parkland, most of which is open to the public. There he and William were permitted to treat their home as anything but a palace, racing their BMX bikes around the grounds, brandishing rubber swords as they swashed and buckled through the hallways lined with portraits of centuries-old ancestors, and wood-paneled interiors illuminated by antique chandeliers dripping with crystals. Other famous royal residents of Kensington Palace have included Queen Victoria, who grew up there, as well as Queen Elizabeth’s sister, the late Princess Margaret.
Diana had tapped South African interior designer Dudley Poplak to modernize many of the Waleses’ rooms in a largely contemporary decor of bright sherbet colors and pastels among the antique furnishings, marble fireplaces, tapestries, and priceless paintings. Their entire top floor was a nursery with professionally stenciled walls, a pair of rocking horses, and a menagerie of stuffed animals. Harry’s favorite toy was a Snoopy that had once been Diana’s.
Although he would later say that to him she was just Mummy, Harry was born to the most famous, popular, and glamorous woman in the world. Even his father could not compete with Diana for the public’s affection. She simply outshone everyone else in the royal family, even the beloved Queen Mother.
Charles, who was clearly jealous of Diana’s popularity, would pass it off as a jest during royal walkabouts. “I’m sorry, it’s me you’ve got, not my wife,” he’d say with a self-effacing charm that made him his most “human” and likable. It stung that Diana was the royal spouse who was the favorite of all the photographers and crowds who clamored for a glimpse of the Waleses—and that it was her face that was plastered all over the newspapers and magazines.
Charles and Diana brought this rivalry, and other sources of tension, home with them. Furious parental rows were the noisy norm. Between 1987 and 1990, when Harry was little more than a toddler, Kensington Palace staff who witnessed his mother’s rages described her face as “bright, bright red.” The princess would stalk a length of bookcases, punching the volumes as she shouted at Harry’s father, “No, Charles, no, I won’t, Charles, no, no!” One employee confided that the prince would spew insults at Diana, calling her a “stupid woman” and a “silly young girl.”
Even then, the writing was on the wall. “It was awful, I felt so sorry for Diana,” said the palace staffer. “It was obvious that the two hated each other and I knew they were bound to separate—I could tell by the way they talked to each other.”
The Men in Gray, as Diana referred to the courtiers at Buckingham Palace, were called in to do damage control. What, they pondered, could be causing Diana’s bouts of bulimia and sending the Princess of Wales into fits of uncontrollable hysteria? Experts and shrinks were consulted. Drugs were prescribed. But the root cause was abundantly clear: their marriage was damaged beyond repair and Charles was still quite openly carrying on an extramarital affair with the love of his life, Camilla Parker Bowles.
One of the main bones of contention between Charles and Diana was how to bring up their children. Initially, Charles was keen to hire the woman who had been his own nanny to look after the two young princes. Moreover, he favored the royal boys being homeschooled before they were packed off to a string of boarding schools.
It was the way he had been raised. The way it had always been done.
Diana wasn’t having any of it. She insisted that her s
ons be educated as ordinary boys at a regular school. “I want my children to have as normal a life as possible,” she insisted. “I want to bring them up with security, not to anticipate things because they will be disappointed.” In truth there is nothing normal about being born a son of the House of Windsor and growing up perpetually in the public eye with protection officers from Scotland Yard at their elbow.
But still . . .
Diana’s own parents had separated when she was only six years old, and she had endured the pain of feeling abandoned and unloved throughout her life. “I hug my children to death and get into bed with them at night.” She said later, “I feed them love and affection. It’s so important.” So for the first time ever, the heirs to Britain’s throne spent their first few years of education in the company of other, nonroyal children.
In 1987, Harry enrolled in a three-year preschool as a “cygnet,” the youngest group of students at the tony Mrs. Mynors’ Nursery School, on a leafy street called Chepstow Villas, not far from Kensington Palace, where William had been enrolled two years earlier. It was a cheery place where cutouts of balloons decorated the walls. On his first day of school, Harry hadn’t wanted to get out of the car; but within a few days, he was scoping out the paparazzi with a set of binoculars made out of a pair of toilet tissue rolls—a true kindergarten project! William had warned Harry not to “trust the ’tographers,” so Harry stuck his tongue out at them.
Decades later it was revealed in a documentary that the “ ’tographers” had provoked the adorable shots by sticking their tongues out at the little prince.
At the same age, the boys had also been cautioned to be on their best behavior when they visited their granny the Queen. Naturally, Harry made a goofy face. “And none of that!” Diana would scold.
Aware even during those tender years that William was “special,” Harry already felt a bit left out. He would manage to wangle more sick days off from school than William did so that he could have their mummy all to himself. Diana was not unaware of his machinations, and her heart ached for the little boy who so resembled her elder sister Sarah.
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