by Penny Junor
His childhood experiences had been quite different from Diana’s, but he had the same crippling lack of confidence and self-esteem. Apart from that, they had little else in common. Diana was twelve years younger and loved the bright lights of the city and all that it offered. At nineteen, she was interested in pop concerts, films and shopping. She read women’s magazines and romantic fiction. Charles, old for his years, was a country-lover, never happier than riding his horses, painting the landscape or digging the garden; his bedtime reading was philosophy or history. But Diana wanted so desperately to be loved, and was so skilled at keeping her feelings deep inside her, that no one who saw her in the lead-up to the engagement—not Charles, not friends, not family—had any idea that she was anything other than a happy, funny girl who would fit into his life like a hand into a glove.
THE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM
Once the ring was on her finger, Diana’s life turned upside down. To protect her from the media, she was moved from a friendly, giggly, gossipy all-girl flat in Fulham to a suite of rooms at Buckingham Palace, where she felt very isolated. It must have brought back memories of the painful move from Norfolk to Northamptonshire at the age of thirteen, after her grandfather died and her father inherited the title and the family home, Althorp. This move was every bit as extreme. While everyone did their best to make her feel at home in the Palace, courtiers were no substitute for her chatty young flatmates.
The move, the stress, the attention of the press, the uncertainty, the loneliness, the overwhelming sense of being out of control, were the triggers for the eating disorder that went on to dog her for most of the rest of her life, and destroyed any chance of happiness that she and Charles might have had. She told Andrew Morton in 1991 that the bulimia had begun during the first week of her engagement. She became moody and willful, angry and suspicious, and Charles couldn’t understand it. One minute she was happy and laughing and the next she was screaming at him. She displayed a temper that he had never seen before; it came from nowhere, along with hysterical tears, and it could be gone as quickly as it came. She turned against people she had appeared to like and said they were out to get her, to undermine her, or spy on her. He didn’t know what had happened. Could it be nerves, or the stress of being in the public eye, or even the prospect of being married to him? He said nothing to anyone, but just hoped that it would right itself once they were married and the pressure was off.
Bulimia is not well understood, but one of its possible causes may be major trauma or upset in early childhood. It most commonly—but not exclusively—affects teenage girls, and sufferers often return to it as a coping mechanism in later years. Bulimia usually involves binge eating followed by self-induced vomiting. Secrecy is key, also denial. It can result in dangerous weight loss and a host of related medical problems. It can even be fatal.
Who knows how Diana had imagined life with the Prince of Wales might be. Kate Middleton had eight years to take a long, hard look at royal life before marrying Prince William, and she was nearly ten years older than Diana had been on her marriage day. Charles was heavily engaged in royal duties. When he wasn’t working, he was playing: fox hunting and shooting in the winter, polo and fishing in the summer; and spending weekends, as often as not, in the country houses of good and established friends. He already had his own country house in Gloucestershire—Highgrove—and, having reached the age of thirty-two on his own, looked after by servants who took care of his every need, he was set in his ways and quite content with life as it was. All that was missing was a family of his own—the warmth and companionship of a wife and the pleasure and excitement of children.
He fondly imagined Diana would fit into his life without the need for any radical change, but he didn’t realize what a determined woman he had taken on.
To those celebrating on the day they married, it seemed like the culmination of a fairy tale, but in reality it was the beginning of one of the saddest stories of modern times; even as they walked down the aisle of St. Paul’s Cathedral, they both knew in their heart of hearts they were making a mistake.
Charles found it difficult to cope with Diana’s demands and her mood swings, and his own moods became increasingly unpredictable and volatile; if she was disappointed by her first taste of marriage, so was he. Both their expectations of marriage were unrealistic; neither could gain from the other even a fraction of what they needed.
The arrival of Prince William on 21 June 1982 brought brief respite, but it didn’t last long. Although delighted to be pregnant, Diana had suffered from morning sickness for most of the pregnancy and, according to her “was as sick as a parrot the whole way through the labor… Anyway the boy arrived, great excitement. Thrilled, everyone absolutely high as a kite—we had found a date where Charles could get off his polo pony for me to give birth. That was very nice, felt very grateful about that!” She went home to Kensington Palace the next day, where a nursery nurse was waiting to help take care of William, but she plunged almost immediately into severe postnatal depression.
But to family, friends and the country at large (with the exception of some vociferous republicans), Diana’s baby brought nothing but elation. He was the first direct heir to the throne to be born in a hospital, and he could not have been born at a more auspicious time. Just the day before, Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister, had announced that hostilities between Britain and Argentina over the Falkland Islands had finally ceased. Victory restored national pride and brought huge relief to families whose loved ones had been fighting in the South Atlantic, not least the Royal Family. Prince Andrew had served as a Royal Navy helicopter pilot, insistent, despite protests from Cabinet members, who wanted him transferred to a desk job, that he should be allowed to do the job he had trained for. The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh supported him, just as they did nearly thirty years later when Prince Harry wanted to serve on the front line in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Prince Harry’s birth, two years later, on 15 September 1984, was also a cause for national jubilation, and despite Diana’s rather bitter memory of her husband’s reaction to his birth, those who knew them at the time say Charles was every bit as excited as he was the first time around, and if he was disappointed that Harry was either a boy or red-haired, he showed no sign of it.
Harry was christened Henry Charles Albert David (to be known as Harry) and was given a younger and less daunting selection of godparents than his brother, including more of Diana’s friends. They were her old flatmate, Carolyn Bartholomew, Princess Margaret’s daughter, Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones, Gerald Ward, a businessman and landowning friend of Charles, the artist, Bryan Organ, who had painted Diana in 1981, Lord Vestey’s second wife, Cece, and Charles’s younger brother, Prince Andrew.
The christening, held four days before Christmas at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, was shown on the Queen’s traditional Christmas television broadcast. It was memorable for William, well into “the terrible twos,” misbehaving. He tried to grab the antique christening robe his brother was swathed in (it was already on its last legs having been worn by every royal baby since 1840); he complained that he wasn’t allowed to hold the baby, and chased his cousin, Zara Phillips, round the legs of the Archbishop of Canterbury, which everyone including the Queen and the Queen Mother seemed to find funny. The two Queens had brought up their own children with iron discipline from an early age but, for now, William got away with it. It was not until he was a pageboy at Prince Andrew’s wedding to Sarah Ferguson, two years later, when he fidgeted throughout, rolled his order of service into a trumpet, scratched his head, covered his face with his fingers, poked his tongue out at his cousin Laura Fellowes, and left Westminster Abbey with his sailor hat wildly askew, that the Queen let it be known his behavior was not acceptable.
Looking at the Princes today, it seems hard to believe that William was the naughty one and Harry a shy little boy who was overshadowed and bossed about by his big brother. But all of that was to change.
OUT WITH THE OLD
Out of a mixture of embarrassment and loyalty to his wife, Charles took the easy way out and said nothing to his friends by way of explanation. They only realized they had been dropped when the phone stopped ringing, the letters stopped coming and the invitations to Highgrove and Balmoral stopped arriving; unsurprisingly they were hurt. As for Harvey, the dog, he was sent off to see out his days with the Prince’s Comptroller at his house in Kent.
Her demands spilled into his working life too. Diana wanted him at home with the children and after Harry’s birth, sent Edward Adeane, the Prince’s Private Secretary, a note to the effect that the Prince would no longer be available for meetings at either end of the day because he would be upstairs in the nursery. Adeane couldn’t believe it. He was an old-school courtier, a barrister and a bachelor, eleven years older than the Prince. He had no understanding of what it was like to change a nappy, bathe a baby, or read a little boy a bedtime story. New man he certainly was not, and he was not happy for his boss to become one either. His best times of day with the Prince were first thing in the morning and last thing at night. They were the two moments in a normally very busy day when there was some peace in which to talk and to go through vital briefings for the day ahead. But to appease Diana, Charles cut down on his official engagements and on time spent with his Private Secretary. “He loved the nursery life and couldn’t wait to get back and do the bottle and everything,” Diana told Morton. “He was very good, he always came back and fed the baby. I [breast]fed William for three weeks and Harry for eleven weeks.”
The press soon noticed that he was doing less and called him workshy and lazy. He became alarmingly depressed. While his contemporaries were all heading for the peak of their careers, he felt he served no useful purpose. He was facing possibly decades of opening buildings and visiting foreign lands, meeting only those people who had been carefully selected to shake his hand. Everywhere he turned there were people in need. Often the solutions seemed simple but nobody seemed to be addressing them, and he was being told he must not get involved. He knew well enough that the sovereign and heir should remain above politics, and that social deprivation was as political as it gets, but he couldn’t just sit on his hands and do nothing. He knew there was a social revolution going on outside the palace gates and felt compelled to help in some way, but how? This was not a question previous Princes of Wales had asked: there was no blueprint.
In 1972, he had given away, anonymously, his naval allowance of £3,000 a year, to help disadvantaged young people get small business enterprises off the ground. It was the beginning of the Prince’s Trust, which was formally launched in 1976, the year he left the Navy. What started as a few ideas scribbled on the back of an envelope has grown into the UK’s leading youth charity, with a multimillion pound income. It is as mainstream as it is possible to be. It has given a leg-up in life to well over half a million eighteen-to thirty-year-olds, and spawned many other extraordinarily successful initiatives.
It took courage to keep addressing the ills of society when newspaper headlines, his father and his most senior advisors were all telling him he should keep out of it. But in his working life the Prince of Wales has never been short of courage, and he continued to say what he believed, and to stick his head recklessly above the parapet when he felt passionately that something was amiss. In the year of Harry’s birth he took almost the bravest risk of all. Against the backdrop of terrifying race riots, he accepted an invitation from Stephen O’Brien, who ran a catalyst organization called Business in the Community, to convene a conference at Windsor for business community and black community leaders to meet. It was one of the most significant advances in race relations ever made, but it could have gone terribly wrong.
His son has inherited a lot of his determination.
THE MIDDLE PERIOD
Parenthood had affected Charles dramatically. It had focused his mind on the future and on the world that his children would inherit; made him re-evaluate his philosophy and his life; given him a whole new perspective. Looking at alternative ways of doing things—in medicine, architecture, farming and everything else—was a natural follow-on to his conviction that the established ways were inadequate; that the greatest profit was not always the best motive, that people’s quality of life was important for the peaceful future of mankind; that everyone, no matter what their color, creed or disadvantage, has a valuable role to play in the grand scheme of things. He entered what he said Carl Jung would have described as “the middle period.” The press interpreted it as encroaching lunacy.
These were difficult years for Charles; he was being pulled in too many different directions. There were Diana’s demands and his anxieties about her; there was Adeane wanting him to confine his activities to safe, traditional areas, and there was Michael Colborne, a trusted friend and aide, telling him to forget what previous Princes of Wales had done—and to look about him. There was a whole generation of young people out there who needed his leadership and he should stop feeling sorry for himself and go out and do something about it. Colborne had followed the Prince from the Navy—he had been a Chief Petty Officer—and he was one of the few people who told the Prince of Wales what he needed to hear.
There was no denying Charles did feel sorry for himself. Meanwhile, the media’s obsession with Diana, which had begun before they were even engaged, had continued remorselessly. Day after day, trivial stories made the headlines. If she accompanied him to an engagement, it was her the newspapers wrote about: her clothes, her hairstyle, her weight, her body language, accompanied by endless speculation about what this or that look or gesture might imply. Prince Charles might not have been there for all the notice the press took of him or his speeches. The frustration was unbearable. He was being eclipsed by his wife.
She read the newspapers obsessively: she reveled in her fame and superstardom; she basked in the adulation, but the slightest criticism hurt her to the quick. Charles was not the only one who was worried about the effect it was having on her. He tried inviting the editors to Kensington Palace to meet him and Diana for lunch so they could try to reason with them, but to no avail. Diana sold newspapers.
He began to lose heart, and it was a very unhappy household in those early years after Harry’s birth. Charles was demanding and quick to lose his temper over nothing. His staff tiptoed around him and, one by one, they left. First Colborne then Adeane. Adeane’s successor was Sir John Riddell, an investment banker in his early fifties, who had a young family and a delightful attitude to life. As one of his staff said of him, “I cannot count the number of times I have been into John’s office with a disastrous problem to solve, to come out again with the problem still unsolved but feeling that the world was a much nicer place.” He was one of the Prince’s best appointments; he gave him a new lease of life. His humor did wonders for the office, which was not the happiest of places; and over the next five years the Prince’s public life began to flourish. Having been tortured and uncertain of where he was going or what his role should be, he began to see a way forward.
The irony was that, in the mid-1980s, the Prince and Princess of Wales were an unbeatable double-act. Abroad, they were a sensation, and on every trip—to Australia, America, the Gulf States, Italy, Japan, Canada—the reception was rapturous. At home he was saying all the uncomfortable things that needed to be said and making a serious contribution. She, meanwhile, was sprinkling fairy dust, not just in the m
ost likely and convenient places, but also in more challenging areas, which the world would rather have forgotten—like drug addiction, leprosy, AIDS and homelessness. She was proving quite unparalleled in her ability to charm, communicate and empathize with ordinary people. She was beautiful; she wore glamorous clothes, sparkling jewels; the cameras loved her, the public loved her, and the happy, smiling face that she presented so professionally to the outside world never faltered.
At home it was a different story.
Charles was not the person best suited to deal with Diana, but he had done all he could to make her happy. It was never the case that he didn’t care—he was simply at a loss. As the months and the years rolled by with no let-up in her behavior, he became hardened and at times downright callous in his attitude towards her. When she became hysterical, there was nothing he could do or say to calm her down; so when she made dramatic gestures, he walked away. When she self-harmed, he walked away. Not because he didn’t care but because he knew he couldn’t help.
As anyone with experience of an eating disorder will know, it is an incredibly destructive illness and can break up even the most secure and normal of families; and this family was not normal. One of the Prince’s former Private Secretaries once said to me, “I’ve never succeeded in describing to anybody who wasn’t in the middle of it, the pressures of that life and that relationship, and looking as she looked and being who she was. Almost any human being would have found it absolutely intolerable. Wherever you happened to be, every look, every gaze, every smile, every scowl, every hand you held or touched, under the microscope every time, front-page news in the tabloids day after day, sometimes of your own volition, I know, but everybody after you. It was the most extraordinary pressure. I did the same sort of work for politicians. It was utterly different. There was a clear-ish divide between public and private life and I didn’t need to cross any of these dividing lines.
