At least one move ahead in this bizarre chess game, Camilla always seemed to know everything that transpired between Diana and Charles, and during these pre-betrothal “tests” she counseled Diana on how to behave with her royal beau. “Don’t push him into doing this; don’t do that,” Diana later recalled.
The naïve teen was confused by it all, particularly by Charles’s indifference to her physically, even as he appeared to be rushing her at breakneck speed toward the altar. She commented that as a suitor “. . . there was never anything tactile about him. It was extraordinary, but I didn’t have anything to go by because I never had a boyfriend.”
For weeks she puzzled over the Camilla-Charles dynamic. But finally, the penny dropped. “Eventually I worked it all out and found the proof of the pudding and people were willing to talk to me.”
Was that why Diana laughed in his face when Charles proposed marriage to her on February 6, 1981, at Windsor Castle? Surprised at her reaction, Charles was “deadly serious,” according to Diana, reminding her that “you do realize that one day you will be Queen.”
She let it sink in and told Charles “Yes,” adding, “I do love you so much. I love you so much,” to which Charles replied, “whatever love means.” He would later repeat the line on international television. But when Charles said it directly to Diana, she chose to put an utterly different construct on it, interpreting the words to mean I love you, too. “So I thought that was great.” Admitting her naivete, she added, “I thought he meant that.”
Looking back on it as she made the secret tapes that would be smuggled to biographer Andrew Morton, Diana realized that Charles had “found the virgin, the sacrificial lamb and in a way he was obsessed with me. But it was hot and cold, hot and cold. You never knew what mood it was going to be. Up and down, up and down.”
Ironically, Charles would repeatedly charge his wife with the same behavior.
Diana was still only nineteen years old on February 24, 1981, when the royal engagement was officially announced. That day, at a press conference, Charles and Diana were asked if they were in love. It was supposed to be a puffball question. “Of course,” Diana replied. Charles dragged out his stock “whatever love means” response, which immediately threw a wet blanket over the already faint romantic spark.
Charles’s doubts about their compatibility were expressed privately as well. According to Christopher Wilson, only a month before the royal wedding he confided to a friend, “She is exquisitely pretty, a perfect poppet . . . but she is a child. She does not look old enough to be out of school, much less married.” True: she was still a teenager. And Diana may have lived in large houses with plenty of servants and extensive art collections, but she’d never had a demanding job, never managed a staff, never run an office or been a slave to a punishing schedule. In fact, she’d always gotten out of anything she found unpleasant or demanding. In no way was she prepared for the full-time, real-life demands of being a royal and sharing her husband with the rest of Britain—including Camilla Parker Bowles. Charles aired his misgivings with his parents as well, but was met with an acrimonious scolding.
For years people have questioned why Diana said yes to Charles’s proposal of marriage, knowing how much Camilla Parker Bowles was in the picture. There are several possible reasons. By then, Diana was in love with Charles—or had convinced herself she was. Somewhere deep down she knew it was a lopsided match, but she believed it would blossom into a mutual True Love. If it could happen in Barbara Cartland romances, why not in real life? Since their wedding vows contained the promise of eternal fidelity to each other, Diana may have thought Charles would take them seriously, as he did so many of his other responsibilities to his subjects, and Camilla would be snipped out of the romantic picture.
Also, Diana was ambitious. Although she had cold feet in the days before the wedding, and despite her premonition that she would never be queen, she also knew instinctively that something big had always been in store for her, the chance to do something for the people and to do her duty. She passionately wanted to be Princess of Wales.
Yet she nearly called it off. Journalists and paparazzi had dogged her everywhere she went, and she claimed to have been given no advice on how to cope. Diana maintained her cool with the members of the press, but inwardly she was panicked and falling apart. She began to suffer bouts of bulimia that would plague her for practically the rest of her life, bingeing and purging, bingeing and purging. Three weeks before the big day and scarcely twenty years old, she bolted to Althorp after a party where Charles utterly ignored her. After a heart-to-heart talk, her father, Earl Spencer, convinced her to go ahead with it. She nearly collapsed from the strain just a few days in advance of the wedding, and her sisters tried to buck her up, teasing, “Too late, Duch [Diana’s family nickname]; your face is on the tea towels.”
Although Charles’s biographer Penny Junor refutes these claims, according to Diana the royals and palace staffers were cold to her. She insisted that none of her future family was there to greet her when, on the day before her engagement was announced, she was told that she had to move out of her Colherne Court flat and into the Queen Mother’s residence, Clarence House. Instead Diana discovered a letter on her bed from Camilla Parker Bowles inviting her to lunch—written days before Diana herself found out where they were going to send her. In the innocuous guise of an avid equestrienne, Camilla, keen on marking her territory, intended to suss out whether Diana intended to accompany her future husband on the hunt.
“The Camilla thing rearing its ugly head the whole way through our engagement” stressed out Diana immensely. She was a wreck in the final days leading up to the wedding, but was gladdened by a sweet gift Charles sent to her after the rehearsals. It was a signet ring embossed with three feathers (the Prince of Wales’s crest) and “a very nice card that said ‘I’m so proud of you and when you come up I’ll be there at the altar for you tomorrow. Just look ’em in the eye and knock ’em dead.’ ”
On July 28, 1981, “her last night of freedom,” Diana was “very, very calm, deathly calm. I felt like I was a lamb to the slaughter.” Diana may have later regretted her hyperbole; even the most nervous of brides don’t look upon their trip to the altar as a journey to the abattoir.
The following day, all the world was ready for a royal wedding, except for two and a half people. Diana spotted Camilla in St. Paul’s as she walked down the aisle. “Let’s hope that’s over,” she thought, with renewed self-confidence. Diana recollected that during the ceremony she was “so in love with my husband that I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I absolutely thought I was the luckiest girl in the world.”
Seven hundred fifty million people in seventy countries watched them exchange their vows—vows Charles apparently never intended to keep. In a way, he was committing perjury in the most public of witness boxes.
During his engagement to the virginal Diana, Charles had continued to sleep with Camilla, and they even made love within days of the royal wedding. Charles’s valet Stephen Barry told the Daily Mirror’s royal watcher James Whitaker, “Sir had always been infatuated with Camilla since they first knew each other in the early 1970s. But when he took her to bed in the very week of his wedding it seemed incredible. Certainly incredibly daring, if not incredibly stupid.”
“I was told one thing, but actually another was going on,” Diana said of the universal campaign to “gaslight” her when it came to Charles and Camilla’s relationship. “The lies and the deceit. For example my husband sending Camilla Parker Bowles flowers when she had meningitis. ‘To Gladys from Fred.’ ”
“Fred” also gave “Gladys” a gold and enamel bracelet with an entwined F and G. Diana discovered the gift shortly before the royal wedding and went ballistic. It was just one of many vociferous rows they had over the Camilla issue. But the angrier and more emotional Diana became, the more Charles shut down, fighting her fire with frost. His insensitivity only served to turn her shrewish.
Their honeymoon abo
ard the royal yacht was anything but romantic. Every night they were expected to dine with the Britannia’s officers, hosting parties instead of doing as newlyweds should. One day, as the prince and princess compared appointments, photos of Camilla fluttered out of Charles’s diary. Diana’s devastation sparked yet another quarrel. And one evening Charles sported cuff links embossed with interlocking Cs. Diana guessed their provenance, but instead of being sensitive to her dismay, Charles snarled that Camilla was a dear friend and would always remain so, and yes the cuff links were a gift from her—but what of it?
What of it? He phoned Camilla every day during his honeymoon with Diana, to complain about how difficult she was, intimating that he had made a dreadful sacrifice for his country. Diana was convinced that her husband was “obsessed with Camilla”—and she was right. This fixation on Mrs. Parker Bowles was just about the only thing the newlyweds had in common. Diana admitted that “at night I dreamt of Camilla the whole time. . . . I had tremendous hope in me [for our marriage] which was slashed by day two.” She confessed to “crying my eyes out on our honeymoon. I was so tired, for all the wrong reasons . . .”
In October 1981 the Waleses’ first child, William, was conceived, and finally Diana had something positive and joyous to focus on. But it was a difficult pregnancy. Her horrendous morning sickness was compounded by her bulimia. The grueling pace of her schedule didn’t help. The doctors prescribed pills, when according to Diana all that was required was a little patience, from the royal family in general and from her husband in particular. She had a huge learning curve to master in a brief space of time with no coaching, while they’d been doing it all their lives.
“I learned to be ‘royal’ . . . in one week,” Diana said, petulant that no one had ever told her “Well done!” when she got something right, as if she were a schoolgirl who’d aced an exam or brought home an excellent report card. “My husband made me feel so inadequate in every possible way that each time I came up for air, he pushed me down again.” Yet during their public appearances, she was the one they scrambled to see. Charles knew that people on his side of the cordon during a walkabout were disappointed that they didn’t get the princess instead, and it made him angry, bitter, and jealous. He couldn’t see that his wife was an asset, said Diana’s friends.
In the face of her husband’s rejection, Diana acted out, in desperate, troubled bids for his attention. She threw herself down a flight of stairs when she was pregnant with William, and later admitted to a doctor who began to treat her bulimia that she had attempted suicide four or five times. One evening when Charles dismissed her complaint about something as “crying wolf,” she grabbed his pen knife from his dressing table and “scratched myself heavily down my chest and thighs. There was a lot of blood.” Instead of embracing Diana and endeavoring to understand her pain, Charles behaved as he usually did: he absented himself—either emotionally, literally, or both.
Diana claimed that the worst day of her life was when she realized that Charles had gone back to Camilla—the woman she privately called “the rottweiler.” Soon after Prince William’s birth, the princess, already an emotional basket case from severe postpartum depression, overheard Charles’s end of a romantic telephone conversation with Camilla while he lounged in his bath. “Whatever happens, I will always love you,” the prince told his lover. Diana confronted him and yet another “filthy row,” as she termed it, ensued. She was convinced that her postnatal blues were exacerbated by Charles’s ongoing affair. Many was the night that he rang up with some excuse about working late, or didn’t come home at all. In November 1983, Diana suffered a miscarriage at Balmoral. When she most needed her husband’s support, Charles left to join the prestigious Beaufort Hunt—and Camilla.
The queen was convinced that her son’s marital problems stemmed from Diana’s bulimia. Although Her Majesty was perfectly aware that (to her disgust) Camilla remained in the picture, she refused to dignify the subject by raising it.
Small wonder, then, that Diana and Charles no longer shared a bed after their second son was conceived, although, ironically, Diana admitted that she and Charles “were very, very close to each other the six weeks before Harry was born . . . then suddenly, as Harry was born it just went bang, our marriage, the whole thing down the drain. . . . By then I knew he had gone back to his lady but somehow we managed to have Harry.”
To Diana’s chagrin, “We had to find a date where Charles could get off his polo pony for me to give birth.” After Prince Harry was born on September 15, 1984, instead of making sure that his wife and child were well and healthy, according to royal biographer Christopher Wilson, Charles’s first reaction was a slightly dismissive “Oh, it’s a boy” (he had hoped for a girl), followed by “And he’s even got red hair”—as do so many Spencers, but no Windsors. Charles then departed the hospital in a huff, off to play polo.
It was another turning point in the Waleses’ already troubled marriage; but this time it seemed that the breach was irrevocable. “Something inside me died,” Diana told her friends.
Seeking solace, explanations, or simply affirmations, Diana began to rely on astrological analyses, crystals, aromatherapy, Eastern medicine, such as acupuncture, and holistic approaches to healing.
And in 1989 she began to focus on charitable causes, finding her calling by combining her royal duty with her nurturing instincts. “Anywhere I see suffering, that is where I want to be, doing what I can,” Diana told a conference of church leaders. She cared about the underprivileged and the undernourished, lepers, sexually abused children, teens with substance abuse issues, and the homeless. She visited hospitals giving “a cuddle” to AIDS patients at a time when much of the world considered them contagious untouchables.
Yet despite her grueling schedule of personal appearances, Diana had plenty of time for her sons. In addition to the Waleses’ other incompatibility issues was the subject of child rearing. It was important to Diana to be a hands-on parent—something both she and Charles had missed out on. She strongly felt that their boys should grow up as “normal” as possible, and attend school with other children. Charles wanted his own former nanny Mabel Anderson (who some have said bore a striking resemblance to Camilla) to educate the children at Kensington Palace.
As Charles continued to find solace and enjoyment in Camilla’s arms, Diana took a string of lovers as well. One of them, James Gilbey, observed of the Waleses, “Their lives are spent in total isolation [from each other]. It’s not as though they ring each other and have sweet chats each evening and say: ‘Darling, what have you been doing?’ It simply doesn’t happen.”
By the autumn of 1990, it was Charles who was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He began to spend more and more time at Highgrove, his Gloucestershire estate located within a brief drive from Bolehyde, where the Parker Bowleses resided. According to journalist James Whitaker, “Camilla was now regarded by their friends as Charles’s official hostess in Gloucestershire. She boasted about the roses she was growing in the Highgrove garden, she threw dinner parties for Charles, and she sunbathed in the gardens in a bikini while Charles pottered in the garden nearby. Set against the standards of most civilized people this behavior was outrageous. A neighbor told me, ‘It was as if neither cared who saw what was going on. They were, to all intents and purposes, living as man and wife.’ ”
When the prince took it upon himself to return to Kensington Palace, where Diana remained with their sons, it became the scene of such tension and acrimony that one of Diana’s friends nicknamed it “the Mad House.” Staffers felt compelled to choose sides. According to another of her friends, all the positive reinforcement Diana had done on her self-image during Charles’s absences was decimated when they were back under the same roof.
Charles had tried to dissuade his wife from attending the fortieth birthday party for Camilla’s sister Annabel Elliott on February 2, 1989, but Diana insisted on putting in an appearance. After her husband and Camilla disappeared from the party for hours, D
iana, although cautioned not to do so, decided to search for them. She found Charles and his mistress deep in conversation with another man and announced that she had something private to say to Camilla. The men beat a hasty retreat and an anxious Camilla braced herself.
Diana told her, “I would just like you to know that I know exactly what is going on between you and Charles, I wasn’t born yesterday. . . . I’m sorry I’m in the way, I obviously am in the way and it must be hell for both of you, but I do know what is going on. Don’t treat me like an idiot.”
As this anecdote was related by Diana, Camilla’s reaction is unrecorded. But Diana later told Charles, “You may ask her. I just said I loved you—there’s nothing wrong in that. . . . I’ve got nothing to hide, I’m your wife and the mother of your children.”
That part of Diana wanted to hold on to Charles, even if by the skin of her teeth; another part of her wanted to snip at least some of the ties that bound them. She told Andrew Morton, “If I was able to write my own script, I’d say that I would hope that my husband would go off, go away with his lady and sort that out and leave me and the children to carry the Wales name through to the time William ascends the throne.” She may have known that for some time Charles had harbored the pipe dream of chucking it all and moving to Tuscany with Camilla.
In the summer of 1989 Diana was encouraged by her own family and by her in-laws to try to make a fresh start of things with Charles. At this stage, divorce was considered unthinkable by all parties, even though the Waleses couldn’t stand to be in the same room with each other. They took a much publicized trip to India in early 1992, and while Charles addressed a group of business leaders in Delhi, Diana stole the limelight by having herself photographed posing alone in front of the Taj Mahal, the ultimate monument to love.
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