by Tim Clayton
For years he made sure that Amanda and Charles were thrown together whenever it could be engineered, and was delighted when Charles first reported how attractive she had become, at age fifteen, on holiday in the Caribbean. Charles continued to find her attractive, and in the summer of 1979 he proposed to her, but Amanda said no. Neither this gentle rejection nor Mountbatten’s murder a few weeks later diminished the old hero’s influence. As Diana mentioned Mountbatten’s name, Charles would have seen before him another perfect example of his great-uncle’s ideal bride.
* * *
Soon after their conversation on the hay bale, Charles invited Diana to a performance of Verdi’s Requiem at the Royal Albert Hall, followed by supper at Buckingham Palace. Lady Fermoy accompanied them as chaperone. The same week Mary Robertson discovered her nanny’s true identity:
I was cleaning up after my day at work and I found a bank deposit slip tucked under the skirt of the sofa in the living room where Patrick’s toys were sprawled all over the floor. It was a deposit slip from Coutts & Company, which I knew from my job was the bank to the privileged, and her name was stamped on it, Lady Diana Spencer. And I did a double-take – by then we had been in London long enough so I knew this was not just a title, but a fabulous title. I took the slip along to my job the following day, I said nothing to Diana, and my office had a copy of either Burke’s or Debrett’s, I don’t remember which, and I looked her up and discovered that she was as blue-blooded and aristocratic as you could possibly be.
Before finding the bank slip Mary Robertson had supposed that when Diana talked of weekends in the country she meant sleeping on the couch in a friend’s cottage. After Robertson had extracted a promise that one day she might visit Althorp, Diana asked her employer whether she would be able to take her next two days off. She was planning a trip to Scotland. What she didn’t tell Robertson was that she was going up to the royal estate at Balmoral to stay with her sister Jane Fellowes, ostensibly to see her new baby.
Prince Charles was at Birkhall, the Queen Mother’s house near Balmoral, and made a point of inviting Diana to join him on several of his favourite Scottish walks. They got to know each other better. By the time that Diana accepted a personal invitation to the royal yacht Britannia for the week of the Cowes regatta in August, Charles was already telling friends that he thought he might have met the woman he would marry. Those who had not already met her were keen to. They were ‘all over me like a bad rash’, as Diana later put it, using one of her favourite phrases. Charles’s assistant private secretary, Oliver Everett, received an early impression that this romance might go the distance. Robert Spencer remembers his cousin Johnny telling him at the same time that ‘he was thrilled that Prince Charles seemed to be so keen on Diana’.
Charles asked Diana to return to Balmoral for the weekend of the Braemar Games in early September as part of his house party. Charles had several friends staying in or around Balmoral Castle.
Mr and Mrs Parker Bowles were there. I was the youngest there by a long way. Charles used to ring me up and say: ‘Would you like to come for a walk, come for a barbecue?’ so I said ‘Yes, please.’ I thought this was all wonderful.
As well as Camilla Parker Bowles and her husband Andrew, the guests included Charles Palmer-Tomkinson and his beautiful wife Patti. At the centre of their party was Prince Charles, with his valet, Stephen Barry, fussing over his personal comfort. By now Barry and the servants were also speculating, but could pick up no sign that Diana was being accorded special treatment. Nevertheless, Charles’s friendly but intimidating friends, all much older than Diana, were certainly vetting her closely.
Charles taught Diana to fish. They marched off with picnics to distant cottages. In the evening, after drinks with the Queen at six, they would dress for dinner at eight. Charles’s brothers vied with him to sit next to Diana. She did her best to behave perfectly in the presence of the Queen, to whom even Charles deferred.
Charles told his friends that he found Diana warm, approachable and enthusiastic. He very much appreciated how easily she went along with his plans and mixed in with the group. Most of the friends, like Patti Palmer-Tomkinson, quickly came to share Charles’s view of the pretty teenage girl who had suddenly come among them. She was great fun to have around and she appeared to be devoted to Charles. It was delightful to see, and it certainly seemed to make Charles happy, which wasn’t always easy. The Prince confessed to one of these friends that he was not yet in love with Diana, but felt that he might come to fall in love with her in time.
Diana was excited by this new insight into the private life of the Prince of Wales, of whom she was still very much in awe. Once he was away from his mother, life revolved around him. His valet sorted his clothes, picnics appeared from the kitchen, everyone fell in with his wishes. In September at Balmoral he liked to walk in the hills and fish in the Dee. So this was what his friends did too.
* * *
It was fun being a friend of the Prince of Wales, moving around the beautiful estates that housed the van Cutsems and the Romseys, the Parker Bowleses, Soameses and Palmer-Tomkinsons. Life was relaxed and stylish: riding horses through woods or along riverbanks, early evening drinks in the garden, an excellent dinner to follow. It was pleasant for Charles too. For inside the walls of his friends’ country homes he could escape from the aspects of royal life that he found tedious or stressful: the crowds, the flowers, the ‘and what do you dos?’, the pestering journalists and the pompous local dignitaries. Broadlands and Bolehyde, Eaton Hall and Bowood: these were oases of relaxed pleasure where he could read and think, paint and fish; where he could be himself.
‘From his childhood this boy will be surrounded by sycophants and flatterers by the score, and will be taught to believe himself as of a superior creation.’ Thus the veteran socialist Keir Hardie had prophesied on the birth of another Prince of Wales, the future Edward VIII. Twenty years earlier the constitutional historian Walter Bagehot had explained that
All the world and all the glory of it, whatever is most attractive, whatever is most seductive, has always been offered to the Prince of Wales of the day, and always will be. It is not rational to expect the best virtue where temptation is applied in the most trying form at the frailest time of human life.
Nothing much had changed. Charming as he was at the centre of his own charmed circle, Charles enjoyed having things his own way. ‘He had a lot of charisma but he was a very selfish and old-fashioned man. Everything rotated around him,’ we were told by a courtier of the late 1970s. Diana would soon begin to realise that the Prince of Wales, his friends and his servants all had an interest in preserving the lifestyle they had grown to know and love.
* * *
Royal photographer Arthur Edwards of the Sun was driving the last few miles on his way to the Highland Games at Braemar. With him were his friends and rivals from the Daily Star, flamboyant James Whitaker, and his photographer, Ken Lennox. Fixed in Edwards’s mind was the usual target – a snap of Prince Charles with a girl – when they suddenly saw Charles’s car parked by the side of the road:
We were driving along the River Dee and I spotted the green Range Rover. And there he was fishing. And there was this girl. She was dressed like a man but you could tell. She had green wellies on, one of these Barbour coats and a cap. We got closer and this lady ran up into the trees and hid behind a tree. And a colleague of mine – Ken Lennox – said, ‘Look, if you go that way, I’ll go that way. We’ll get her in a pincer movement and she’ll have to come out of the trees.’ Which we did. And we saw her with her vanity mirror looking round at us. And at the point where we would have photographed her, she made a dash up through the trees. And all I had was these pictures of this girl’s rear end rushing to the car.
Prince Charles was absolutely livid. He put his fishing gear away and stomped off to drive back on to the estate somewhere.
Ken Lennox thought, ‘My God! Who is this he’s got? This is interesting.’ He was so impressed by the woman’s
cunning evasion tactics that he wondered whether Charles might have something to hide. She had put a tree between him and her and all he had was a very fuzzy picture of her face that would not do for the paper. Edwards was more dogged. That afternoon at the Highland Games he made his usual enquiries of his usual sources. He was told that the mysterious she-male was Lady Diana Spencer and that she was following Prince Charles around like a lamb. The moment he heard the word ‘Diana’, he put two and two together: it was the girl at the polo with the necklace with the ‘D’. He had a photo already! ‘I rang the office immediately, and said, “That picture I sent back from the polo – can you get it out, it’s her!”’ Then he rang Harry Arnold, who was at a party in Kent. Arnold filed the story with sounds of disco music in the background. And so, on 8 September, beside ‘Yippee! It’s Wild West Week . . . see page 3’, the Sun had the scoop: ‘He’s in Love Again! Lady Di is the new girl for Charles’. Edwards’s polo photo was on the front page.
* * *
Diana came back from Scotland for the start of the new term at the Young England kindergarten to find that she had become a celebrity. The press quickly found out where she lived and followed her to Mary Robertson’s mews house.
She burst into my bedroom and said, ‘I have something important to tell you, Mrs Robertson.’ And I was blowing my hair dry and I said, ‘OK, go ahead, tell me, Diana,’ and she said, ‘No, I’d like your full attention please.’ So I put the hairdryer down and I can still see her – she was standing in the bedroom doorway and she was blushing and looking down. And she told me that when I left for work I would see photographers and reporters at the end of the mews. I couldn’t imagine what they were doing there and she admitted that they were following her.
I did a double-take and said, ‘Good heavens, Diana, what have you done?’ And she said, ‘Well, I spent last week up at Balmoral Castle.’ I asked if it was with Andrew because I knew they were the same age. And she said, ‘No,’ and she was blushing and looking down at the floor and very modest, very demure, you know, very Diana, very understated. She said, ‘No, actually I’ve been with Prince Charles.’ And I just couldn’t believe it, I said, ‘Oh, that’s terribly exciting, do you think anything’s gonna develop?’ And she blushed again and said, ‘No, I really don’t think so. After all, he’s thirty-one, I’m only nineteen. I don’t think he’d ever seriously look at me.’ And I said, ‘Well, I wouldn’t be too sure.’
Kay Seth-Smith was just back from holiday and hadn’t seen the picture of Diana in the paper. She was shocked when she arrived at her Pimlico school to find photographers mingling with the new parents outside. Pushing her way through, she asked the staff what on earth was going on, and Diana blushed and giggled and said, ‘I’m afraid it’s my fault. I was photographed with Prince Charles at Balmoral.’ Harry Arnold and Arthur Edwards were soon at the door, determined to develop their scoop by constructing a portrait of this latest fetching candidate for the Prince’s hand.
We went down to about half a dozen nurseries – we knew she was a nursery school teacher – and we found this nursery school, the Young England kindergarten. I knocked on the door: ‘Does Lady Diana Spencer work here?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Would she come out and have a photograph taken?’
Kay Seth-Smith told Edwards that she would go inside and ask Diana:
And I said to her, ‘How do we get rid of them? What about if you go and have your photograph taken?’ And we were both very naïve in those days, and didn’t realise this was not the way to get rid of photographers.
So she said yes she would do that, but could she please take some children with her. And I said – well, yes, I suppose that’s fine, but I’d better ring their parents up and say, you know, did they mind if their children were photographed. So I selected I think it was four children who I thought wouldn’t be totally fazed by strange people thrusting cameras in their faces. I rang their parents up and said, ‘We’ve got a rather unusual situation here – one of the teachers has been photographed with Prince Charles – you probably didn’t know this and, um, they’re now very anxious to get another photograph of her. Would you mind if your son or daughter was photographed outside with her?’ And then I laughed and said, ‘You never know, she may be the Queen of England.’ And anyway, Diana went out, very embarrassed, clutching these children with her.
The photographers were delighted she was using the children as props and even more delighted, Edwards says, at their next stroke of luck: ‘That was the picture where the sun came out halfway through the photographs and we saw her wonderful legs. And of course she blushed when she heard about that . . . She was very good at blushing.’
Kay Seth-Smith recalls that it did not take long for the pictures to appear:
Later that afternoon, I suppose just after lunch, the doorbell rang, and somebody thrust a copy of the Evening Standard at me. And there on the front was this picture of her, in the see-through skirt. And I remember thinking, Oh dear, I think I’ve really blown this for her. And she took one look at it, went bright red, and put her hands up to her face in absolute horror.
But the picture of the shy girl with children in the see-through skirt didn’t ruin it for Diana. Charles is said to have commented, ‘I knew your legs were good but I didn’t realise they were that spectacular.’ The sunlight effect may have been luck rather than guile on the part of the photographers – Edwards says the weather changed. But the image with its triple message – naïve, sexy, homely – had a lasting impact. The siege of the kindergarten intensified:
More and more press descended on us. And every day it got worse, we had television crews front and back, we had photographers hanging out of trees peering in windows. It was actually a fair nightmare to live with and of course Diana had no help, we had no help, none of us knew what we were doing.
* * *
On Diana’s third visit to Balmoral in early October she stayed with the Queen Mother at her house at Birkhall. The rhythms of life there had altered little during the twentieth century. While the men went out stalking deer, Diana remained at Birkhall doing her needlepoint with the ladies. The Queen Mother and her close friend Lady Fermoy, Diana’s grandmother, were soon entirely in agreement with Mary Robertson. Something might well develop. From now on the Queen Mother’s London home, Clarence House, would become a powerful source of pro-Diana sentiment inside the Royal Family.
Like the young Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, Diana offered youth, vitality and British blood to the still largely Germanic Royal Family In the twentieth century the Battenbergs had become Mountbattens and the Saxe-Coburgs had become Windsors. If accepted into the Royal Family, Diana would be the first English-born bride for an heir to the British throne for nearly three hundred years, since Lady Anne Hyde married the future James II. Diana was all English on one side and on the other a mix of Scottish, Irish and American.
Diana was an old friend of the family with links to the court on both her mother’s and father’s sides. Her parents, grandmother and sister all had experience of life inside Buckingham Palace. And she showed every sign of being eager to adapt to whatever challenge royal life might bring. Above all she appeared to love Charles. He would be lucky to find anything better than this.
A senior courtier working directly for Prince Charles told us that just two weeks after Diana had been spotted on the Dee, the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Philip Moore, told him, ‘I do hope he gets a move on and proposes to her for God’s sake, the Queen is very keen.’
* * *
With newspaper photographs of Diana now appearing daily, the pace began to quicken. Camilla Parker Bowles invited Diana to her home, Bolehyde Manor, the weekend after she returned from Balmoral. Stephen Barry, Charles’s valet, had his suspicion that Diana was a serious love interest confirmed when Charles rang him one morning to ask him to drive her to the country. On 24 October Diana appeared at Ludlow and stood, side by side with Camilla, watching the Prince race his horse, Allibar, in the Clun Handicap. On Sunday Charles and Andrew Parker Bow
les joined the Beaufort Hunt while Diana spent the morning talking with Camilla. Charles had just bought nearby Highgrove House. That afternoon he showed Diana round it and invited her to suggest ideas for its redecoration. Camilla was giving Diana advice on how to please Charles. As Diana later said, it was advice that revealed just how well the older woman knew him.
I couldn’t understand why she kept saying to me, ‘Don’t push him into doing this, don’t do that.’ She knew so much about what he was doing privately . . . I couldn’t understand it.
Diana and Charles spent the following weekend at Bolehyde too.
* * *
It is not clear just when Diana began to worry about the nature of Charles’s relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles, or indeed when she learned about its history.
Charles first met Camilla Shand in the summer of 1972 when he was twenty-three, and fell for her with the intensity of a true first love. Andrew Parker Bowles, her on-off boyfriend since 1966, had been posted to Germany in 1971. Charles had embarked on a career in the navy, and he had to join HMS Minerva three weeks before Christmas. They did not have much time together, and at that time neither he, nor even the press, was thinking seriously about marriage. He entertained Camilla on board twice and then, still very much infatuated, left for the Caribbean on an eight-month tour of duty. In April he learned that she had accepted an offer of marriage from Parker Bowles. Charles suffered a terrible ‘feeling of emptiness’, as he later confided to his biographer Jonathan Dimbleby.
Marrying Andrew did not remove Camilla from Charles’s circle. As a Household Cavalry officer, Parker Bowles was frequently included in parties at Balmoral and Windsor. As his wife, Camilla was invited to the same events. Charles came to regard her as one of his best friends. Charles and Camilla frequently exchanged long telephone calls. Some people began to think they were having a clandestine affair, and in 1979, by Charles’s own account, they were. When Andrew Parker Bowles went to Rhodesia, Charles spent a lot of time with his wife and, when Parker Bowles returned, Charles attended the ceremony for Rhodesian independence, taking Camilla with him as his official escort. Gossip about this web of relationships was only very occasionally aired in public, but it was not kept entirely secret.
