by Penny Junor
About sixty members of the press were waiting outside the gates of Balmoral that Thursday, a crowd for the Highlands, yet they uttered not a single word as the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, Peter Phillips, the Prince of Wales and the two boys stepped out of their cars to look at the flowers and the tributes. There were hundreds, but nothing compared to what awaited them in London. The only sound to be heard apart from the clicking of the camera shutters, was the voices of the royal party. It was the first time in the five days since Diana’s death that the country had seen her sons. It was a touching scene. All three Princes, father and sons, were visibly moved by what they saw and taken aback by the messages attached to the bouquets.
“Look at this one, Papa,” said Harry, grabbing hold of his father’s hand and tugging him down. “Read this one.”
Of all the criticism that Diana leveled at the Prince during their bitter war of words, nothing could have been more hurtful, or less truthful, than the suggestion that Charles was a bad father. And the sight of him that day with Harry, and the obvious bond between them, was a revelation to a lot of people who had thought him cold and heartless. It was a bit of a game-changer. And when the Queen made a surprising live television broadcast the following evening, the mood in the country softened further and the very real danger that hung over the future of the monarchy that week was averted.
“Since last Sunday’s dreadful news we have seen throughout Britain and around the world an overwhelming expression of sadness at Diana’s death.
“We have all been trying in our different way to cope. It is not easy to express a sense of loss, since the initial shock is often succeeded by a mixture of other feelings: disbelief, incomprehension, anger—and concern for all who remain.
“We have all felt those emotions in these last few days. So what I say to you now, as your Queen and as a grandmother, I say from my heart.
“First, I want to pay tribute to Diana myself. She was an exceptional and gifted human being. In good times and bad, she never lost her capacity to smile and laugh, nor to inspire others with her warmth and kindness.
“I admired and respected her—for her energy and commitment to others, and especially for her devotion to her two boys.
“This week at Balmoral, we have all been trying to help William and Harry come to terms with the devastating loss that they and the rest of us have suffered.
“No one who knew Diana will ever forget her. Millions of others who never met her, but felt they knew her, will remember her.
“I for one believe that there are lessons to be drawn from her life and from the extraordinary and moving reaction to her death.”
A LONG WALK
The Spencer family had initially wanted a small, private funeral—and the Queen had been inclined to agree; but, as the public mood intensified, they all came round to the Prince of Wales’s view that Diana should have nothing less than a full royal number at Westminster Abbey. And so it was; but it was not without complications. Charles Spencer wanted to walk behind the cortège on his own. The Prince of Wales wanted to join him, and he felt Diana’s sons should be able to walk too if they so chose; he felt it might help the grieving process. Downing Street meanwhile was suggesting a “People’s Funeral” with the public following the coffin.
The Prince of Wales and his former brother-in-law got into a bitter war of words over it, but the matter was finally settled by the Duke of Edinburgh who announced that he would also walk. So it was that William and Harry walked alongside their father, grandfather and uncle.
Alistair Campbell, Tony Blair’s Press Secretary, claimed in his diaries, The Blair Years, that Sandy Henney had been asked by the Prince to talk the boys into walking with their father because he was afraid that without them he might be attacked by the public. That was not true. “At no time,” says Sandy, “was there ever a question of using the boys as a barrier against possible reaction from the public towards my boss. But there was genuine concern as to what reaction the public might have to the Prince of Wales—and indeed any member of the Royal Family from a highly emotionally (and some may say irrationally) charged public. The boys talked about walking with the cortège to close members of their family and only those they trusted, and no one they talked to at that time would ever speak to a third party about what the children said.”
They joined the cortège at St. James’s Palace, and for the long walk to Westminster Abbey, past hundreds of thousands of people lining the route, some of them sobbing openly. They walked knowing that the cameras and the eyes of the world were upon them. It is hard to imagine an experience that could have been more intimidating for a fifteen-year-old, let alone a twelve-year-old child but, flanked by his uncle and his father, Harry bravely kept his composure. So too did William, who walked between his uncle and his grandfather; and it was only once they were in Westminster Abbey, out of sight of the cameras, when at times the occasion got to them, that they allowed the mask to slip.
But the most heartbreaking of all the sights that day was the white envelope tucked into a bouquet of white freesias on top of the coffin with the simple word: MUMMY. Sandy had rightly guessed that the boys might want to write their mother one last note. “I remember ringing Tiggy. ‘The boys are going to put some flowers on their mother’s coffin?’ ‘Of course.’ ‘And they’re going to write a note aren’t they?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Right, could you do me a favor? Please make sure that whatever they say is in an envelope.’ ‘Okay. Why?’ ‘Because one of the first things the cameras are going to do is zoom in on their words.’ ”
Her foresight that day protected them from the most basic violation; but no one could protect them from Charles Spencer, their uncle’s hostile words.
“Diana was the very essence of compassion, of duty, of style, of beauty. All over the world she was a symbol of selfless humanity,” he said in his tribute that was broadcast all over the world. “Someone with a natural nobility who was classless and who proved in the last year that she needed no royal title to continue to generate her particular brand of magic…
“She would want us today to pledge ourselves to protecting her beloved boys William and Harry from a similar fate, and I do this here, Diana, on your behalf. We will not allow them to suffer the anguish that used regularly to drive you to tearful despair.
“And beyond that, on behalf of your mother and my sisters, I pledge that we, your blood family, will do all we can to continue the imaginative way in which you were steering these two exceptional young men so that their souls are not simply immersed by duty and tradition but can sing openly as you planned.”
It was an extraordinary insult to the people that William and Harry, now motherless, loved most: their father and their grandparents, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, who were right there in the abbey. The Prince of Wales was particularly galled that it was coming from a man who’d had a disastrous marriage of his own and who had brought his latest mistress to the funeral.
Diana had said she wanted to be interred in the family crypt at Great Brington alongside her father and grandmother, Cynthia, but it was deemed that the small churchyard would be unable to cope with the anticipated volume of visitors. So, after the funeral, her coffin was driven slowly to Althorp, her ancestral home in Northampton, past thousands of spectators on the roadside, while the Prince of Wales, William and Harry and the Spencers all made the journey in the Royal Train. Diana was buried instead on an island in the middle of a lake on the estate where, in life, she had been refused a home. It has become a shrine and her brother has turned the old stable block into a permanent exhibition in her memory, which the public can visit. But there are some who think her body was later quietly placed where she had wanted to rest.
In the aftermath of the funeral, Earl Spencer was feted for his speech and the Prince of Wales criticized for having “forced” his sons to walk behind the cortège. Stuart Higgins, editor of the Sun, refused to believe it was the boys’ own choice. Sandy Henney nearly came to blows with him.
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sp; “When she died, the country may have lost a Princess but two young boys lost their mum and I’ll never forget saying to Stuart, who I actually like a lot, ‘Who is anyone to tell those boys what they should do? I’m sick of this Our Princess has died. Their MUM has died; they should choose where they walk.’ All this nonsense of the children being forced to protect Charles. Right up until the last minute when the boys decided to walk behind the coffin there was a plan that if they couldn’t do it—entirely their choice—I would go, take them from the Prince’s apartment at St. James’s across to Clarence House and they would go to the funeral with their great-grandmother. It was their choice and it angered me that everyone was saying what the boys should and shouldn’t do in relation to their mother’s funeral.”
GETTING ON WITH THE DAY
Two days after their mother was buried, Tiggy took William and Harry to the Monday meet of the Beaufort hunt. Charles was hugely grateful to have Tiggy around to help keep everyone’s spirits up.
As soon as they arrived, Captain Ian Farquhar, the Master went over to them. “It’s good to see you, sirs,” he said. “I just want you to know that we are all very, very sorry about your mother. You have our deepest sympathy and we were all incredibly proud of you on Saturday. That’s all I’m going to say, and now we’re going to get on with the day.”
“Thank you,” said William. “Yes, you’re right. We all need to get on with the day.”
And metaphorically as well as literally, that is exactly what they did. Whether by nature or nurture, both boys had even then that Windsor ability to keep their emotions in check. Charles, rightly afraid that he would be blamed for Diana’s death, was dreading his first public engagement after the funeral, which included a visit to a Salvation Army drop-in center in Manchester, in one of the most notorious estates in the city. Walking into a hall full of cameras, he discarded his prepared speech and spoke about his two sons.
“I think they are handling a very difficult time with enormous courage and the greatest possible dignity,” he said. “I also want to say how particularly moved and enormously comforted my children and I were, and indeed still are, by the public’s response to Diana’s death. It has been really quite remarkable and indeed in many ways overwhelming. I think, as many of you will know from experiences of family loss in your own lives, it is inevitably difficult to cope with grief at any time. But you may realize, it is even harder when the whole world is watching at the same time. But obviously the public support, and the warmth of that support, has helped us enormously. I can’t tell you how enormously grateful and touched both the boys and myself are.”
One can only guess about whether, in their determination to get on with the day, they grieved sufficiently, but what is certain is that the bond between them after their mother’s death grew ever stronger. They were there for each other, then and in the weeks, months and years that followed. It was not just William for his little brother. Harry was very much a support for William, and has remained so. Sandy thinks he knew at an early age that his role was to support his brother. “I can’t think of another spare,” she says, “who’s ever supported the heir in the way that Harry’s supported William. Whatever people say, both the Princess and the Prince got it right in terms of bringing up those two boys, in that they actually loved each other. Of course there was rivalry, they are just like normal siblings, and Harry was a typical younger pain-in-the-arse brother but adored by William. There’s a deep love and respect there—and what bonded them even more was that their mum died.”
William went back to Eton and to the care of his exceptional housemaster, Dr. Andrew Gailey, and Harry went back to the embrace of Ludgrove, where he was doing an extra year. It had always been the intention to keep him at Ludgrove for that extra year, so that he would move on to his senior school as a rising fourteen-year-old, rather than a rising thirteen. This meant that most of the friends in his year had moved on, including his closest friend, Henry van Straubenzee. Henry had joined his elder brother, Thomas, at Harrow. But it also meant Harry knew the school inside out, and most of the boys, so he wasn’t an object of curiosity, and he had other friends.
At half-term, when he would have been with Diana had she been alive, the Prince of Wales was committed to a five-day tour of South Africa, Swaziland and Lesotho; rather than cancel it, or leave Harry at home with Tiggy, he decided to take Harry and Tiggy with him, along with a schoolfriend called Charlie Henderson. Also in the party was Mark Dyer, a friend of Tiggy’s and a former Equerry to the Prince of Wales. He was brought in to be her male counterpart, and was another hugely significant figure in William and Harry’s life after their mother’s death. Harry and his father flew out on separate flights, and while Charles and his entourage carried out his program of engagements, Tiggy, Mark, Harry and Charlie and a few others all went off on safari in Botswana on a trip organized by Mark. It is a country Harry has been back to again and again, but that was his very first taste of Africa and the beginning of a love affair with the continent, its people and its wildlife.
It was a trip filled with magical and unforgettable moments. From Botswana they met up with the Prince of Wales at Fugitives’ Drift, a lodge perched above the Buffalo River, in a remote and beautiful part of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. From there they were taken to Isandlwana and Rorke’s Drift, the sites of the two greatest battles of the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879. Their guide was David Rattray, an electrifying storyteller and expert on the war, who was sadly murdered ten years after the Princes’ visit. The battle of Isandlwana was arguably the most humiliating defeat in British colonial history—and the basis for the iconic 1964 film Zulu. Eleven days after the British commenced their invasion of Zululand, a Zulu force of 20,000 warriors, armed with their traditional assegai spears and cow-hide shields, attacked a group of about 1,800 British soldiers armed with state-of-the-art weaponry. Some 1,300 British and native troops were killed; the Zulus lost about 1,000 men. Rattray interpreted it not as a British defeat but as a Zulu triumph. But the tables were turned just a few hours later, at Rorke’s Drift, a few miles away, where just 139 British soldiers successfully defended their garrison against an almighty assault by 3,000 Zulu warriors. Rattray, who spoke Zulu fluently, had an extraordinary ability to transport his audience back to the day of the battle and to recreate its sights and sounds. As one commentator said, “To listen to David Rattray narrate the story of Isandlwana was akin to watching the best-scripted, best-directed and best-produced movie Hollywood’s finest studios could put out. It was goose-bump stuff.” For a thirteen-year-old wannabe soldier, it was mesmerizing and, in June 2014, Harry was at the fiftieth anniversary gala screening of Zulu at the Odeon in Leicester Square to raise money for the David Rattray Memorial Trust, Sentebale and Walking with the Wounded. He told the daughter of the film’s director that it was one of his favorite films. He watched it every year before Christmas, “Maybe once; maybe twice.”
The significance of meeting President Nelson Mandela for tea at his residence in Pretoria would not have been lost on Harry, even at the age of thirteen, but nothing could have been quite as exciting for a thirteen-year-old as meeting the Spice Girls at the height of their girl-power fame. President Mandela had paid a State Visit to Britain the previous year and, during it, Prince Charles had taken him to a particularly good Prince’s Trust event at a leisure center in Brixton. The two men had got on famously, and Mandela had been inspired to set up something similar in South Africa, which became the Nations Trust. Charles had asked the Spice Girls if they would fly to South Africa to sing at a Two Nations fundraising concert.
It was a star-studded evening held at a huge stadium in Johannesburg, and Sandy Henney, who had the usual task of organizing a photo call, asked the Prince of Wales whether she could include Harry in it. The press, she argued, had been good in leaving him alone on the rest of his holiday. He told her to ask Harry. “So I said to Harry, ‘Would you like to meet the Spice Girls?’ and typical boy, ‘Oh yeah; can Charlie come too?’ ‘Of cour
se he can.’ I remember going into the girls and saying, ‘Harry would like to come over and meet you and I know he’s larger than life but don’t forget his mum’s not long dead,’ and they said, ‘No, no bring him.’ I got Harry and Charlie and took them in, ‘Harry, Charlie; Spice Girls. Spice Girls; Harry, Charlie.’ Baby Spice said, ‘Come and sit over here,’ with Posh Spice the other side and the little boy sat down and he was absolutely beaming. ‘Oh, isn’t he lovely?’ They were doing the same to Charlie too, they were excellent.” Afterwards, Harry and his father and the girls went outside for the photo call, and again Baby and Posh tucked him between them, and Sporty fussed over him. He stood grinning, like a cat who’d got the cream, and was declared the star of the show. “He was just like any kid meeting his heroines, these gorgeous girls who had just been singing and were going to go and sing for him again.”
Mark Dyer was the perfect appointment: having been an Equerry, he knew the whole family, and they him. The Prince’s idea was that he would work alongside Tiggy to be a friend, companion, role model and a bit of a mentor—all the things a responsible older brother might be—and to provide some healthy normality. Since working for the Prince, he had left the Army and started a wine bar in Chelsea. Mark, or Marco as he is widely known, was a Welsh Guards officer. He is tall, good-looking and red-haired; colleagues describe him as a Captain Hurricane figure. He proved to be all that the Prince hoped he would be, and more; like Tiggy, he has been loyal to his bootstraps and is still very close to Harry. “He was a rugby player, a good egg,” says one of Harry’s team who knows him well. “He’s a very straightforward, hard-drinking, hard-living adventurer, and a great soldier. He was also somebody the Princes could relate to at that age; and they remembered him from their childhood when he’d shown them guns and tanks and things and taken them rock climbing. The press thought he was a bad influence but he did a bloody good job for them. He had huge integrity, and he was around when they needed advice that didn’t come from their father.”
