by Tim Clayton
Over the four months that led up to our wedding, I was swept along with the tide. Every person I met seemed powerful to me: the ladies in waiting, the protection men, even the housemaids. I assumed they must know what to do, as they had all been at it much longer than I.
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Royal press officer Ronald Allison recalls that:
Once the engagement was announced, the focus of the press was even sharper on Lady Diana Spencer than it had been before. They were no longer speculating about who the Prince of Wales was going to marry, they were absolutely concentrating whole-heartedly, one hundred per cent, on the person he was going to marry.
The black dress she had bought from the Emanuels received a mixed reception. As Diana stooped low to climb out of the royal car, the photographers snapped the shot they had most wanted – soon-to-be-royal cleavage to match September’s legs. Diana was blushing again. A few days later she was photographed in Cheltenham having her hand kissed by gallant sixth-former Nicholas Hardy. Innocent enough, but laden with the sexual innuendo that was now creeping into coverage of the royal couple. Edmund, Lord Fermoy, Diana’s uncle, asserted to journalist James Whitaker that she was a virgin, tempting Private Eye to dig for dirt. They unearthed the name James Boughey and the insinuation that he was not known in his regiment for pursuing platonic relationships, but nothing more damaging. Other friends were targeted by the press, and to Diana’s annoyance Simon Berry’s pictures of their skiing holiday appeared in the Sunday Mirror.
Journalist Christopher Hitchens remembers the fevered atmosphere in the build-up to the royal wedding:
A story of this kind will always find the G-spot in our great profession. She was quite pretty, she was young and blushing and innocent. There was an undertone of the salacious which doesn’t hurt the circulation . . . It’s actually brilliantly caught in Martin Amis’s novel Money, which is set at the time when the royal wedding’s about to occur. And there’s a big discussion down the pub about whether he’s ‘given her one’ or not. And I certainly remember those kinds of discussions, they were inevitable, they were all part of it.
From Charles’s tour, meanwhile, came the unsurprising news that everybody wanted to see Diana. Charles was constantly apologising for her absence and was embarrassed by various incidents with women, including a posse of fake Dianas and a bikini-wearing girl rising for a kiss from the waves of Bondi Beach.
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For photographers Diana was a gold mine and for the most part they, like Jayne Fincher, were
Just very excited about it. I mean, all the men were madly in love with her instantly and we all adored her straight away because she was great fun to photograph. We had this very pretty girl and it was a fairy story and we all loved the story and obviously it was very good for us because, you know, it kept us really busy. Everyone in the world wanted pictures of her.
Unfortunately, Diana was not always prepared to co-operate:
She was so painfully shy. And every magazine in the world wanted a picture of Diana on the cover – you know, a nice head on the cover – and her head was down the whole time. We’d all say, ‘Did you get her head up? Did you see her eyes?’ I think I had one picture of her with her head up before she got married.
She did make a comment about it to me later. She said that if she heard the ladders – because we all have these aluminium ladders that we stand on to get over the heads of the crowd – she knew that we were all in front of her so she’d keep her head down. And then if she heard the sound move away she could put her head back up again.
However well meaning the photographers were, the persistence of their pursuit and the constant worry that she might provide the wrong sort of photograph were stressful. Press officers recall Diana coming into their offices in tears, begging them to get the press to leave her alone. They had meetings with police chiefs at Scotland Yard about the problem, but they judged that it was simply impractical to shut the door.
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During March and April, Diana got to know the staff of the various offices and began to get a sense of the royal establishment within which she now had to live and work.
At the top of the pyramid of royal service were the private secretaries, one for each member of the family. They governed with the assistance of deputies and equerries. Many of the jobs were semi-hereditary, although most courtiers had a background in the armed forces and some were on secondment from the Foreign Office. The latter, though often gifted individuals, were in the job too short a time to be able to bring much experience to bear, and this may explain what look like some rather poor decisions on royal tours.
In My Story, Sarah Ferguson provides a hostile account of the palace ‘grey men’, as she called them. Where some speak tactfully of a desire not to rock the boat, or of inflexibility, she condemns self-serving inertia, downright laziness, pompous mediocrity. She refers to levels of pay that attracted snobbery more than talent, to suits, polished shoes, old-school or regimental ties (Guards for preference). She speaks of umbrellas handed to footmen at the Privy Purse entrance, of days devoted to the control of information, the careful channelling of messages through at least four secretaries. Gin and tonic in the Equerries’ Room at 12.30 sharp would precede lunch in the Household Dining Room, the most senior of the three staff dining rooms at the Palace. In their own common rooms the ruling secretaries could joke about their masters and mistresses in private. Sarah’s account is unlikely to be fair, but many of the details are corroborated by what Patrick Jephson, Diana’s private secretary in the nineties, said about the Palace establishment in his book Shadows of a Princess.
Prince Charles’s immediate staff were hardly ideal company for her. The Hon. Edward Adeane, born in 1939, bald and bespectacled, had been private secretary to Prince Charles since 1979. He was a precise and intellectual bachelor, whose father and grandfather had also been royal private secretaries. He was very conservative and was already engaged in a rearguard action against the Prince, for whose enthusiasms he felt little instinctive sympathy. It was about the Prince, not the Princess, that he once remarked, ‘If I hear the word “caring” again, I’m going to be sick.’ Diana flirted with him and teased him and at first they got on quite well. His assistant, Francis Cornish, on secondment from the Foreign Office, had been with the Prince only since May 1980. He was thirty-nine and a much more approachable figure than Adeane, but his first loyalty was to the Diplomatic Service, and he was not anxious to get too involved in the personal lives of the Royal Family. Cornish’s precursor in this job, Oliver Everett, was less reserved. He abandoned his Foreign Office career and accepted the Prince’s offer to become Diana’s unofficial private secretary. He liked both Charles and Diana, and made every effort to be friendly to his young charge. He was tall, dark and square-shouldered with a strong jaw – quite Diana’s sort. But his endeavours to get her to read up on the Constitution and the role of the monarchy met with scant success. Dull, difficult books were not Diana’s thing.
Charles had his own differences with Palace bureaucracy, and his private affairs were handled by his own man – the Secretary of the Prince’s office, Michael Colborne. In place since 1975, Colborne had served with Charles in the navy and was – most unusually in this environment – a grammar school boy. He also spoke his mind in a manner that was uncommon in the circles around Prince Charles. He was twenty-seven years older than Diana but soon became one of her closest friends in the Palace.
Lady-in-waiting Lady Susan Hussey was brought in to teach Diana how to be royal. She was devoted to the Queen, whom she had served since 1960, was deeply versed in protocol and possessed a powerful, no-nonsense personality. At the time Diana wrote of Lady Susan as of an elder sister, but later recalled feeling that she had seemed hostile to her. What she most certainly was not was a girlish confidante.
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Diana’s immediate concern was the wedding. She fixed on the Emanuels for her wedding gown. They were ecstatic, if slightly surprised that the job had not g
one to a traditional outfit like Belville Sassoon or Hardy Amies. Diana told them she wanted something romantic. It had to be stunning but classic so that she didn’t disappoint anyone. They laid out their entire range for her and finally found a design she loved. Her mother came to the second session, and they all sat on the floor and pored over sketches. They went through books and pictures of previous royal weddings, determined to outdo them all. They found the royal dress with the longest train and created one that was longer.
Preparations for the wedding brought Diana into frequent collision with other, even more intimidating parts of the royal establishment. A courtier told us that:
It wasn’t long before the apparatus of the Palace got to work over the wedding plans. That part of the Palace is deeply embedded in the Guards, staffed by older people, pretty reactionary. If I found them frustrating, what could it have been like for her?
The wedding was the province of the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Maclean, the head of the royal household. For him and his staff, this would be the biggest event of their career, a moment of defining glory. All agreed that it was to be a splendid occasion, but their ideas of what was splendid did not always coincide.
Charles wanted the wedding to take place in St Paul’s Cathedral, rather than the traditional venue, Westminster Abbey. He preferred the architecture and acoustics of St Paul’s, a church big enough for the orchestras that he wanted to provide music and with space for more guests. The Lord Chamberlain’s staff worried that there were no precedents for the use of St Paul’s. They worried too about the cost – particularly the cost of the extra policemen and soldiers who would be required to guard the much longer processional route that would now stretch all the way from the Palace to the City. Only two years after Mountbatten’s death, the threat from the IRA could not be taken lightly, and the longer route meant that the soldiers would be more widely spaced than the security advisers wished. The Lord Chamberlain’s anxieties were heightened when on the Queen’s official birthday, 13 June, she was shot at by a lone gunman. The assassin turned out to be a seventeen-year-old firing blanks, but for Diana, watching the Trooping of the Colour for the first time, it was a forcible reminder of another of the strains of royal life.
The cogs may have squealed but the royal machine moved efficiently. By the end of June the order of service and the complete programme of processions were ready. Eleven carriages had been selected and prepared, with three closed ones in case of rain. Three thousand policemen and three thousand soldiers had been designated to line the route. Meanwhile the media went into a frenzy of excitement. ITV and the BBC were planning the biggest outside broadcasting event ever on television, and each of them spent £500,000 on coverage. Teams from the American networks descended on London to secure strategic positions on the route to the cathedral. Fees of £2,000 were negotiated for the use of a desirable window on the day. CBS paid £8,000 for a balcony. Both ABC and NBC transmitted their breakfast programmes from Britain throughout the week of the wedding. The BBC arranged to broadcast live to seventy-four countries to a worldwide audience of 750 million people. What the Coronation had done for television sets, the royal wedding did for home video recorders. In 1980 the British video market doubled to around 700,000. For this new market taped souvenirs were made such as The Story of Prince Charles and Lady Diana and Prince Charles: A Royal Portrait. In the full flush of enthusiasm for the royal couple, the BBC screened the first royal quiz show, So You Think You Know about Royalty?, on 19 July, with Cliff Michelmore and Magnus Magnusson as quizmasters.
The commemorative industry was working overtime. At the official level there were stamps and coins; at the commercial, plates and mugs and playing cards, bookmarks and beach balls, place mats and tea towels. The most popular image was that of Charles placing his arms protectively around his fiancée’s shoulders. Since she was slightly taller than him, he had to stand on a box to achieve this effect.
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Diana’s dress needed constant alteration because all the time she was getting slimmer. She lost two stone between her engagement and the wedding. She had been disappointed when she saw the engagement photographs because she looked chubby, an effect only attributable in part to the frumpy blue dress that she was wearing. She showed off her newly glamorous attire and attenuated figure at Ascot and at Wimbledon. The Sun approved of ‘Lady Di-et’.
Few things in Diana’s life story are as contentious as the date of the onset of her bulimia. Old friends support Diana’s own account that it began now, under the sudden pressure of life inside the Royal Family, her mounting anxiety about Charles’s true feelings and her worries about her weight.
Bulimia experts point to the family history of eating disorders – Diana’s sister Sarah had been anorexic for a while – and say that generally this condition begins in the mid-teens. Those who portray Diana as unbalanced before she met her husband naturally seek to root the bulimia in the past, but there is scant evidence of it. Mary Robertson is emphatic that Diana showed no sign of an eating disorder while she shared a fridge and a bathroom with her family. And the first photographs that could possibly be said to show Diana looking unhealthily thin were taken in Wales in October 1981, some months after the wedding.
She was certainly anxious to look slim in order to be a credit to her husband and to live up to her new billing as a beautiful princess. She was a teenage girl thrown into this world of palace and sexual intrigue alongside older and more worldly people, all of whom were confident in their familiar environment. She was insecure and unknowing. The excitement of having been chosen to be the Princess of Wales was quickly buried in a misery of worry about what marriage to Charles might be like and whether he really loved her – an agony of jealous, anxious teenage first love exacerbated a million times over by its national significance. Enough to make anybody sick.
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Charles returned to London at the beginning of May, but if Diana thought she would now have him entirely to herself she was soon disappointed. According to a senior member of the royal household:
Lovely chap though he was, her fiancé gave no indication of thinking through what getting married to this person would be like for her. He carried on with his merry ways, his extracurricular bachelor life, one night in Scotland, one night somewhere else. In her case, it was a massively bigger thing.
They did spend some time together. A round of joint engagements began with a visit to Broadlands where he opened an exhibition of Mountbatten memorabilia on 9 May. Diana spoke to children and cuddled babies. Five days later she was at Windsor for lunch with the President of Ghana. Later in the month came a state visit from King Khalid of Saudi Arabia.
On 22 May the couple went walkabout in Tetbury. Jayne Fincher was there with her camera:
He took her down to Tetbury, their future home town. He introduced her to the locals. They did a walkabout and visited the local hospital. And, you know, she was very nervous and he was sort of gently cajoling her round and showing her what to do. She was obviously very new to it, and very shy about it, and he was like the proud peacock showing her off. But he was very gentle and he always had an arm round her showing her what to do, watching her all the time. And obviously was sort of gently nurturing her into it.
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But by now Diana was fretting about Camilla. Private Eye had become more brazen in its accusations against Prince Charles, although its sources and its seriousness remained as ambiguous as ever. At Christmas it reported that White’s Club (venue for Charles’s stag night) had voted him ‘Shit of the Year’:
It was Brian’s behaviour to his girlfriends that clinched matters . . . Now Brian is trying to lead the innocent Lady Diana Spencer up the garden path. In giving him their vote, White’s members have taken into consideration that he will probably be equally beastly to her.
On 3 July, ‘Grovel’ produced another disquieting and apparently authoritative report:
Bets are being taken among Prince Charles’s male friends as to how long
Aussie harpie Lady Tryon will last as the Heir to the Throne’s ‘confidante’ when he returns from honeymoon in September. Melbourne publisher’s daughter Dale Tryon (nee Harper) arrived in England a decade ago with the sole ambition of marrying into the aristocracy, and quickly ensnared Anthony Tryon, whose late father the 2nd Baron, was Keeper of the Privy Purse and Treasurer to the Queen for 25 years. Through him she met Prince Charles and their friendship became close.
But not for much longer, I can reveal.
Lady Diana has yet to meet Dale – Charles calls her ‘Kanga’ – but she has become friends with her fiance’s other ‘confidante’, Camilla Parker-Bowles, whose husband Andrew has recently been made Commanding Officer of Knightsbridge Barracks, where the Household Cavalry is stabled.
It then repeated the story of how Charles and Camilla were supposed to have met, drawing back the curtain to reveal a tantalising glimpse of an ancien régime world of ‘liaisons dangereuses’ in which the naïve Lady Diana was a potential laughingstock. Camilla had indeed done her best to befriend Diana, but it is not surprising that such stories undermined the younger woman’s trust in the older woman’s motives.
Diana was well aware of Private Eye’s vivid coverage of the Royal Family. With little other evidence to go by, its insinuations may have given darker significance to a series of incidents that she cited ten years later to Andrew Morton as signs that her fiancé’s relationship with his ‘confidante’ was not as innocent as she had been told. When she first moved in to Clarence House, she said that she found a note waiting on her bed. It was from Camilla: ‘Such exciting news about the engagement. Do let’s have lunch soon . . . I’d love to see the ring.’ Then, within days of entering Buckingham Palace, she discovered that Charles had recently sent some flowers to Camilla when she was ill with a message using what she claimed were the couple’s pet names for each other: ‘To Gladys from Fred’.
