Harry

by Chris Hutchins

  But this was Sunday and there was no way the Queen was going to allow her family to miss the day’s service. The boys were told to get dressed and be prepared to face a much bigger crowd than usual at Crathie Kirk. William and Harry looked numb, frozen in tragedy, in the back of the black Daimler that was transporting them. Princes Philip and Charles wore kilts as tradition demanded, and stern faces. By order of the Queen there was no reference to Diana in the morning’s prayers. She may have been their mother but Diana had ceased to be a member of the Royal Family and the Queen declared what had happened in France to be ‘a private matter’. Instead of being obliged to take a commercial flight to Paris from Aberdeen, Charles was, however, permitted to use an RAF plane to bring Diana’s body home from the French capital, but he had to use all his persuasive powers to get his mother to allow the coffin to be taken to the Chapel Royal at St James’s Palace rather than the Spencer home.

  What appeared to be the senior family members’ virtual indifference to the tragedy caused Harry to continually ask his father the question: ‘Is it true that Mummy is dead?’ Finding it hard to believe that she was no more than injured, he begged to be allowed to help bring her home. The Queen remained in Balmoral for days, keeping Harry and William with her, permitting them to read a selection of the letters of sympathy that were flooding in. Initially she also resisted all pleas to have the flag over Buckingham Palace fly at half-mast – it had never happened before other than following the death of a monarch. Not one to shed a tear over the tragedy, Princess Margaret complained about the smell of the thousands of bunches of rotting flowers laid in tribute in the gardens beneath her apartment at Kensington Palace.

  When Diana’s coffin was transferred early one morning to Kensington Palace, the Queen Mother, who had always tolerated her, sent her page William Tallon (better known as Backstairs Billy) to place flowers on her behalf but when he returned later he noticed that the casket had been lowered. When he asked why, he was told that Prince Harry was waiting for a last look at his mother’s body so he could be assured she was no longer alive, but he was not yet tall enough to view it in its former position. Finally convinced, he placed a card in her hands on which he had simply written ‘Mummy’. Earlier he had insisted his father take him out to join the crowds viewing the flowers and reading the cards. Charles was visibly saddened but Harry was positively excited as he read out some of the heartfelt messages written to his mother and drew his father’s attention to a number of them.

  The funeral arrangements, however, caused further contention. Charles had asked his sons to walk with him behind the coffin-bearing gun carriage, drawn by six black horses to Westminster Abbey, but William adamantly refused, declaring he had no wish to march ‘in any bloody parade’. ‘I’ll do it, I’ll do it, Daddy,’ Harry said. But it was the Duke of Edinburgh who persuaded the older boy to join them, saying, ‘If I walk, will you walk with me?’ William respectfully agreed and Philip helped the young princes hold back the tears by keeping them in conversation pointing out the London landmarks they were passing. As the procession passed Buckingham Palace, Philip pointed to the balcony where the Queen led other members of the Royal Family in bowing to the cortège.

  Harry still believes that it was the Duke’s rare display of compassion that helped him get through the funeral service even when his uncle, Diana’s brother Charles (by now the 9th Earl Spencer), who had already blamed the press for causing the tragedy, seemed to be firing a shot over the Royal Family’s bows when he said in his eulogy: ‘I pledge that we, your blood family, will do all we can to continue the imaginative and loving way in which you were steering these two exceptional young men so that their souls are not simply immersed by duty and tradition…’ In a sentence that directed aristocratic disdain to the ruling family, he declared that his sister ‘needed no royal title to continue to generate her particular brand of magic’. There was no mention of his rejection of Diana’s plea to return to Althorp when her marriage collapsed citing ‘unwanted intrusion’ as his reason, even though she made it clear that she was in desperate need of the kind of privacy she believed only her family home could offer.

  In initially blaming the media for causing the crash, Spencer was presumably unaware of how his sister had acknowledged her debt to the British press after they honoured the agreement she and Charles had reached with them at the meeting in Kensington Palace. The editors had kept their promise to abide by their wishes. Spencer seemed to blame the entire media for the crazy paparazzi chase by continental photographers and the actions of Fayed’s intoxicated driver. It did not endear him to the British media.

  It was more than two weeks after the funeral that Harry and his brother were given details of the Paris tunnel accident – and then nothing was held back. The drunken chauffeur, the defective limousine, the bodyguard who had not protested against the route that would inevitably lead to a paparazzi chase as well as his failure to insist that his charge put on the seat belt that might have saved her as Ken Wharfe says he would have done. But, above all, it was the part played by Dodi Fayed – as anxious to impress his father with a royal match as he was to win over the Princess – that earned Harry’s wrath: ‘It must have been Sister’s fault!’ he repeated over and over. Harry grew even more furious when Al Fayed inflamed the situation by suggesting that they had both been murdered and, at one point, suggested that Prince Philip was involved in the plot. ‘Who would want to kill Mummy?’ the young Prince asked his father at one point. The Royal Family, having had enough, removed the ‘By Appointment’ logo Harrods had been able to display for many years. It was an unsavoury battle which lasted years before Al Fayed finally accepted that the deaths had been the result of an accident for which his son was partly to blame.

  Harry was the member of the family who suffered most from Diana’s death. William’s looks, easy charm and academic superiority were always going to make life smoother for him. Harry made up for it by going at everything at the double. He was his fragile mother’s son with all of her charged emotions, many of her fears and much of her paranoia. Charles began to allow them greater freedom and encouraged others to befriend them to an extent he would never have experienced at their ages. Tiggy, once Diana’s bitter enemy, became Harry’s substitute mother. At Charles’s invitation, the former nanny was invited to stay with them at Highgrove while they were given time off school to grieve. She spent every waking hour with them going through many of the thousands of letters of condolence they had received to show how much their mother had been loved. William wanted to reply to them all – an impossible task – but Harry just wanted the comfort the second most important woman in the world to him had to offer.

  He also received close comfort and attention from his late mother’s sister Lady Sarah McCorquodale who turned up at Ludgrove on the morning of his thirteenth birthday with a PlayStation, the gift Diana had planned to give him. Sarah and Diana’s other sister, Jane, phoned him every day in a compassionate bid to help him recover from his great loss.

  In an effort to relieve Harry of his grief, Charles arranged for Tiggy to take him and school friend Charlie Henderson on safari in Botswana on his half-term break from Ludgrove – time he would normally have spent with Diana. Charles chose Africa so they could meet up on his breaks from various engagements there – plus he had a special surprise for him when they joined up in Johannesburg: Harry’s favourite group, the Spice Girls, were in town for a concert and Charles had arranged for Harry, who played their records incessantly, to meet them. Once in the city, Harry rarely left his father’s side. The two spent an hour talking in a suite at the new Hilton Hotel and when Charles went outside to shake hands after declaring the building open, he was surprised to hear the crowd shouting, ‘Harry, Harry’. He looked up to the balcony of their suite and saw his younger son snapping pictures of him. ‘He’s right there,’ Charles cheerfully told those who hadn’t spotted the Prince. Later Harry emerged into the world’s spotlight for the first time since his mother’s funeral. S
martly dressed in a dark-blue two-piece suit – Charles had told him he could go in jeans but the young Prince, rapidly becoming PR conscious, said he considered it would open his father up to criticism of being a ‘Diana imitator’ – the two of them went to the concert where he met his heroines backstage. Needless to say they – ‘Baby Spice’ Emma Bunton in particular – made a great fuss of him (although he seemed more interested in the sexily costumed Geri Halliwell) and for the first time in weeks he was seen to smile.

  To Harry’s delight that was not the end of the trip: Charles took him to the remote settlement of Dukuduku where father and son both sampled the local beer – something Charles, now a single parent, would never have allowed in the days when he played the role of stern father. They also called on Nelson Mandela, who gave Harry several gifts which he added to the Zulu souvenirs he had already acquired on the trip. With one exception – a Zulu bracelet which he gave to Tiggy – he still keeps his ‘Africa collection’ in his room at Highgrove alongside his Arsenal scarves.

  The trip proved to be a strong re-bonding experience for father and son and Charles was determined to repeat it when he took Harry and William on an official visit to Canada. Although he had fears that the boys would be overwhelmed by the attention they were obviously going to get, they were delighted by their reception from a screaming crowd of what can best be described as ‘royal fans’. It is interesting to note that Harry enjoyed the adulation and collected a large batch of newspapers adorned with front-page photographs of himself, his brother and his father. William was somewhat more reticent, aware that this was what he would have to experience for the rest of his life and acutely conscious of how much his mother had secretly resented public adulation. From the window of their suite at the Waterfront Hotel in Vancouver, Harry pointed out to his brother a group of screaming girls holding aloft a banner that read ‘William, I’m the one for you’. At that time William was easily the more attractive of the two and, rather like Paul McCartney when he stood alongside John Lennon, was the one the fans were screaming for – but this did not deter Harry. He was perfectly happy to settle for his brother’s cast-offs if necessary, but it proved not to be so; when they arrived in the town of Burnaby he discovered that pupils at the high school they visited had formed a Harry fan club. Charles was pleased with the Princemania he witnessed. During years of walking with his ex-wife through crowds like this he had come to accept, somewhat reluctantly, that the person they had come to see was Diana. But this was different: after everything he and the boys had come through he was happy to take a back seat and watch their popularity grow. Acceptance had become his byword and when the young princes’ photographs dominated the front pages, he knew that the editors were giving the public what they most wanted to see and read. His superstar sons were a breath of fresh air on what otherwise might have seemed a rather stuffy and formal visit. When Harry turned his baseball cap back and called ‘Yo dude!’ to him, Charles’s response – ‘Really, do you have to do that?’ – was more of a gentle admonishment than the strict reprimand he might have given in earlier times. Indeed, it was William who seemed more concerned at Harry’s response to the adulation than their father, according to a veteran British journalist covering the tour. ‘I could see that William was wise enough to see what lay ahead. Everything these boys did would be subject to close public scrutiny, and that meant things bad as well as good.’ How right Harry’s subsequent activities were to prove him.

  Some months after their Johannesburg meeting, the Spice Girls turned up (by helicopter, of course) for tea at Highgrove which Harry – in William’s absence – hosted, serving the girls coffee and cakes and offering them wine from his father’s cellar, all the time regaling them with praise for their hit records, several of which he knew by heart. The young Prince did his best to entertain the girls by reprising some of his own stage performances, in particular loudly repeating the battleground speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V, ‘Cry God for Harry, England and St George!’ Although it went largely unnoticed by most, a disloyal servant claims that the Prince paid little attention to ‘Posh Spice’, Victoria Beckham, who had initially refused to leave the helicopter because of the high wind blowing outside. Nevertheless, it was a big day for the publicity-hungry group too as they reflected on leaving the royal home with goodie bags containing, among other things, free samples of the organic food and drinks sold by Charles for his charity under the Duchy Originals label.

  Once the Spice Girls had departed, Harry told his father that the day had been the second best in his life. When Charles asked him what had actually been the best day, the young fan replied: ‘The first time I met them.’

  Such acts proved that Charles had mellowed – even the feud between the Windsors and the Spencers seemed to have run its course and, in a bid to show that he would not let such a war between the families harm his relationship with his nephews, Charles Spencer declared that he had reached ‘an understanding with the Prince of Wales’. For his part, Charles, who always hated confrontation, said in moderate response, ‘Both boys are coping extremely well – perhaps better than anyone expected.’ That said a lot about royal blood: they had learned from an early age that they had to present a certain veneer regardless of what they were feeling inside.

  Despite what Spencer thought of him, Charles had firmly established himself as the man in his sons’ lives and, as Harry has noted in more recent times, he began to ‘chill out’, taking them on the sort of outings that Diana would have taken them. There was a visit to one theatre to see the children’s classic Doctor Dolittle and another to watch Barry Humphries’s performance as the outrageous Dame Edna Everage. Whereas in the past the Prince might have frozen at the Australian comic’s remarks about the young princes dressing up in women’s clothing, he laughed hysterically and the boys joined in. Back at St James’s Palace, where Charles was now living, Harry charmed the staff with samples of the comic’s performance, telling one servant that Humphries had picked out a large woman seated on the front row of the audience and said to her, ‘What a lovely dress, beautiful material – you were lucky they had so much of it.’

  Although Diana would always be at the front of their minds, with their father’s help they were clearly learning to overcome their grief. Unable to deliver it personally because it occurred in term time, Harry was the one who sent a bunch of flowers to be placed on Diana’s grave on the first Mother’s Day following her death. Soon after Charles gave in to his younger son’s wish to visit the grave on an island at Althorp, the Spencer estate which the heir was never overly keen to visit. It was all part of the healing process and Charles made further efforts to satisfy one or both of his sons’ desires whenever his own duties permitted. He even cancelled one long-standing engagement to take Harry to France to watch England play against Colombia in the World Cup. That day David Beckham became his newest hero after the player scored his first ever goal for England with an impressive free kick. Charles was pleased he had taken the day off from royal duties for he was able to witness a further stage in his son’s recovery from the tragedy of losing his mother so publicly and at such a young age.

  Charles was happy because his sons – particularly Harry – were happy. They were bonding in a way that would never have been possible while the Prince and Princess were at each other’s throats.

  Just one feud remained (and still is) unresolved: that concerning the book written by Paul Burrell, which he called A Royal Duty and which was serialised in the Daily Mirror, then edited by Piers Morgan. The servant made a fortune by revealing the secrets Diana had trustingly shared with him, even reproducing private letters she had written to him at times of great stress, irrationally suggesting in one that Charles was planning for her to die in a road crash, and in another that her husband had put her ‘through hell’.

  It was more than her sons could stand. Despite their tender years Harry and William sat down together and compiled a statement:

  We cannot believe that Paul, who was entruste
d with so much, could abuse his position in such a cold and overt betrayal. It is not only deeply painful for the two of us but also for everyone else affected and it would mortify our mother if she were alive today and, if we might say so, we feel we are more able to speak for our mother than Paul. We ask Paul please to bring these revelations to an end.

  They were no longer boys to be toyed with and their message to Burrell was also a signal to the media world at large.

  7

  OFF THE RAILS

  One troubled year and two days after Diana’s death, Harry joined his brother at Eton. Because he was born in September – on the cusp of the academic year division – he had been able to spend an extra year at Ludgrove in a bid to improve his disappointing academic performance. The exceptionally high standard of learning at Eton was always going to be a challenge for him for, like his mother, he was no academic. Diana had considered two other options – Radley College in Oxfordshire and Milton Abbey in Dorset. Harry, however, wanted to be at Eton because William was there and had been for two years. And anyway, it was close to Windsor Castle where the Queen always spends weekends and even though he was a boarder at the college it was comforting to know his grandmother was nearby and that at weekends he could easily walk and have tea with her, as William often did – resisting the taunts of local yobs who were always on the warpath for the Eton ‘toffs’.

  Prince Charles had his own doubts about Eton: he had wanted his sons to go to Gordonstoun in Scotland where he, his father, two uncles and two cousins were all educated. But the Spencers had always favoured the Berkshire college that Diana’s father and brother both attended.