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Title: Game of Crowns: Elizabeth, Camilla, Kate, and the Throne by Christopher Andersen
Details: Copyright 2016, Andersen Productions
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): ""Let us not take ourselves too seriously. None of us has a monopoly on wisdom."
--QUEEN ELIZABETH
The #/1 New York Times bestselling author of William and Kate and The Day Diana Died takes a compulsively readable look into the relationships and rivalries of Queen Elizabeth, Camilla Parker Bowles, and Kate Middleton.
One has been famous longer than anyone on the planet— a wily stateswoman and enduring symbol of grace, power, and a bygone age. One is the great-granddaughter of a king’s mistress and celebrated homewrecker who survived a firestorm of scorn to marry her lover and replace her archrival, a beloved twentieth century figure. One is a beautiful commoner, the university-educated daughter of a self-made entrepreneur, a fashion idol, wife of one future king and mother of another.
Master biographer Christopher Andersen takes readers behind palace walls to examine the surprising similarities and stark differences among three remarkable women-- Queen Elizabeth; Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall; and Princess Kate. Andersen reveals what transpires within the royal family away from the public's prying eyes; how the women actually feel about each other; how they differ as lovers, wives, and mothers; and how they are reshaping the landscape of the monarchy in this addictive read that will shock even those who are spellbound by the royal palace. "
Why I Wanted to Read It: Sometimes in between heavier reads (and heavier news) I just want a silly read. Royal history is specific and multi-faceted enough to be interesting and the packaging promised this would be pretty light, considering.
How I Liked It: I'll tell you something you can probably guess: this is a trashy book. And sometimes, it's okay to enjoy trashy things. Make junk food a treat but otherwise eat healthy! But what about when it's the lives of real life people involved? We'll get into all of that.
But first! The Queen is dead! At least fictionally, when this book was published (2016). There's a very, very long, very strange chapter of fiction imagining the scenario of Charles actually being crowned King in the event of the Queen's death. It's all the more bizarre to read years later when it's actually happened (and in places, hilarious).
But then the author flashes back to a young Elizabeth as a girl and then taking the Crown and her marriage to Phillip. History bounces around a bit to Charles and Camilla (not to mention Diana) and Kate and William. No behavior is too petty, no slight too small, no fight too frivolous, no dialog too outrageous.
This book was enormously entertaining. Yet at the same time, I harbored no illusions that it wasn't also trashy (and the accuracy of such accounts is... bound to be spotty, to be excessively generous).
I also had my own misgivings of this particular author and his unfortunate habit of portraying just about every woman biography subject as scheming, and this book certainly has that (more on that later).
This book intrigued me enough about a subject (the British Royal Family) to learn more, but I couldn't help wondering, especially in a book like this, the ethics of such consumption.
I'm no stranger to biographies, and the British Royal Family are (almost) all public figures, but their frequently and historically hideous treatment at the hands of the press (who played a role in the death of one of the most popular of all time, the former Princess of Wales) has been well-detailed, including in recent revelations from Prince Harry's book where he describes not only traveling in the trunks of cars to avoid recognition but his grief and trauma of his mother's sudden death compounded by the behavior of the paparazzi at her funeral. So all that considered, is it okay to enjoy books like these?
Well... it's complicated and since it's not my tax dollars that are going to fund the Royal Family, I don't feel entirely comfortable making any pronouncements other than noting the behavior of the media is frequently horrific to these people and you should take this sort of thing with a grain of salt anyway.
That said, this book is fascinating and entertaining. It's also trashy sleaze masquerading as prestige journalism with several questionable aspects that I'll get into in the notes. Is it okay to consume trashy things? Just try to do it critically.
Notable:
One of the more interesting aspects of this book is the reshuffling of the British Royal Family that's taken place in the last five years. Some now major players are barely mentioned and some have developed quite a different reputation since then.
It's clear with William and Kate the author saw them as the Monarchy's last great hope, and Diana's true legacy. Never mind that in 2023, it appears William closely aligns with his father and Kate closely aligns with William, Charles purportedly throwing William under the bus in the press by pushing the story of William's alleged affair, and William and Kate's alleged shabby treatment of Harry (and later, his wife, the Duchess of Sussex).
They are all straight out of a storybook: the beloved queen trying to hold her family and her realm together; the brooding, philandering, driven heir impatient for the throne; the beautiful, doomed wife; the scheming mistress with ambitions of her own; the upstanding younger prince, and his enchanting young wife and children. These and hundreds of other colorful characters spread out over the centuries have made Britain’s
Royal Family the world’s most riveting, glamorous, critically acclaimed, and longest-running reality show. (pg 1)
The Queen had regained much of her standing since the public relations debacle that followed Diana’s death, and she had no illusions about why. Britons were fast in the thrall of the late Princess of Wales’s handsome, athletic, dynamic, and engaging young sons. Harry, whose paternity grew increasingly in doubt as he grew more and more to strongly resemble James Hewitt, was cast as the likable, mischievous scamp. William
was also fun-loving and charismatic, but possessed an air of maturity and seriousness befitting the heir. He also looked the part of a king; at six feet three inches he would be the tallest monarch since Henry VIII.
Conversely, Charles had always seemed aloof, supercilious, and, to the average Briton, deadly dull. Then there was the matter of Camilla; while she was no longer pelted with bread and booed in the streets, the Prince of Wales’s slatternly mistress still represented the biggest threat to the future of the monarchy. “The Queen began to understand what Diana meant,” said a former deputy private secretary, “when she said she was putting all her hopes on William.” (pg 183)
Oh Harry! I mean, he mostly is a double of his paternal grandfather and was no doubt DNA-tested by the Royal Family as soon as such things became available, but by all means, let's push conspiracies about Diana.
IN MARCH 2012, KATE VISITED the legendary specialty shop Fortnum & Mason on Piccadilly with the Queen and her stepmother-in-law— a rare opportunity for the press and public to see the current and future queens shop for delicacies and share a cup of tea in the store’s restaurant. Then she accompanied her grandparents-in-law on a two-hour train trip to the East Midlands city of Leicester. Elizabeth and Philip, aware that Kate had admitted to still being quite “jittery” at the prospect of meeting large crowds of people, spent the entire trip soothing her nerves and boosting her morale.
They needn’t have worried. In the manner of Diana, Kate effortlessly connected with children, seniors, the disabled, her peers— whatever bouquet-bearing group confronted her along the rope line. Most important, never once did she seem condescending, miffed, brusque, uninterested, or simply stiff— criticisms that at one time or another had been leveled at virtually every senior member of the Royal Family, including the Queen.
The Leicester trip included a De Montfort University alumni fashion show, during which Kate, dressed in gray, and the Queen, clad head to toe in shocking pink, schmoozed and laughed for half an hour. Kate “looked amazing, and they were smiling and talking,” said Leicester MP Liz Kendall. “They obviously have great affection for each other.”
It was also evident that the newest member of the royal team was bringing along a touch of enchantment all her own. “It’s a real coup to have the Queen,” designer Karen Millen said, “but also to have Kate, who is a style icon and a great ambassador for British fashion and fashion everywhere.” Kate Bostock, an executive with the British retailer Marks & Spencer, summed up what it was like having Kate and the Queen sitting together in the front row: “It was so...tingly.”
The “Kate Effect,” as the Men in Gray insiders now referred to it, was undeniable. It was also a powerful tool that the Queen intended to employ in her continuing efforts to keep the monarchy alive. By way of gauging just how useful Kate could be, all Elizabeth needed to do was look at the Duchess of Cambridge’s startling poll numbers. A survey commissioned by the Sunday Times showed that 73 percent of Britons believed Kate was breathing new life into the Royal Family. (pgs 268 and 269)
A full day after the baby arrived, father, mother, and child finally emerged from the hospital to the accompaniment of reporters’ shouts and a fusillade of camera flashes. “He’s got a good pair of lungs, that’s for sure,” William told the press. “He’s got her looks, thankfully.” Kate, no less self-deprecating than her modest husband, interrupted. “No, no,” she said. “I’m not sure about that.” What color was the baby’s hair? William wasn’t sure as yet, but added, “He’s got way more than me, thank God!” (pgs 282 and 283)
_____________________________________________________________________________________
When I said the fictional death of the Queen at the beginning of the book, pure speculative fiction, was weird, I mean it.
“What is it, Charles?” Camilla pulls back the draperies that encircle her husband’s massive, ornately carved Georgian canopy bed. Like her mother-in-law, the Duchess of Cornwall has always preferred to sleep in a velvet and damask cocoon, closed off from the outside world. Unlike the Queen, who hadn’t shared a bedroom with her late husband, Prince Philip, for more than a half-century— in part because of Philip’s habit of
sleeping with the windows wide open no matter the weather— Camilla and Charles make it uncomfortably clear to members of their inner circle that they still enjoy an active, even adventurous, sex life. (pg 10)
That can't be too much of a surprise.
The media have long been preparing for this, as well. Every six months, they also practice announcing the death of the Queen. BBC anchors, remembering how newscaster Peter Sissons was upbraided for announcing the Queen Mother’s death wearing a light gray suit and a red tie, now are careful to keep a dark change of clothes at the ready, just in case. (pg 13)
Interesting!
Hundreds of thousands of mourners, many of them openly weeping, file past as Charles, his brothers Prince Andrew and Prince Edward (who assumed the title of Duke of Edinburgh on Philip’s death), and William and Harry all take turns standing guard by the Queen’s coffin in full dress uniform— what has come to be known as the Vigil of the Princes. (pg 14)
Whoops, Prince Andrew!
Palace footmen throw open the twelve-foot-high glass doors, and the muffled roar of the throng outside now becomes clear. “We want the King!” the multitudes cry. “We want the King.” Clive Alderton gestures toward the balcony. “Your Majesty,” he says, “I believe the people wish to see their King.” (pg 27)
Given the reception to Charles and the rather embarrassing concert, this is at best wishful thinking.
In Great Britain itself, where in the aftermath of Diana’s death Camilla had been called a whore by passers-by in the street (“They’ve got to blame someone,” Camilla said then), the new Queen is costing the monarchy dearly. Poll after poll shows that, while the public has fallen increasingly in love with Prince William’s young family, the average Briton chafes at the idea that Camilla has replaced Elizabeth as their Queen.
King Charles does nothing to mollify his critics. In fact, he privately lectures the Prime Minister on a wide range of policy issues— something his politically savvy mother would never have done— and publicly pushes for sweeping urban and environmental reforms. (pg 29)
Having successfully alienated even the monarchy’s staunchest allies in the government, Charles endures one humiliating setback after another. Parliament votes to slash the budget of the royal household dramatically. Certain properties from which the crown derives hundreds of millions of dollars in annual income are confiscated. Antimonarchist republicans, whose efforts have been kept in check by the people’s love for Elizabeth, make huge gains in the polls.
There is one bright spot for the monarchy: Britons remain as smitten as ever with the Prince of Wales and his young family, although given the Windsors’ storied longevity, William will be well into his sixties before Charles’s death puts him on the throne. The Prime Minister suggests to the king that he might stave off the inevitable by bowing to public pressure and abdicating in favor of William, but he refuses. William himself, King Charles points out, has vowed he will never be party to such an unprecedented “scheme.”
In a breathtakingly short time, the love and respect the British people harbored for their sovereign all but vanishes. It becomes glaringly obvious there may be no future King William V, no King George VII. The monarchy is crumbling under the weight of the King’s intransigence. Charles could well be the last to wear the crown. (pgs 29 and 30)
Ouch!
__________________________________________________________________
Speaking of Charles being the worst, he truly is.
Whether the Queen is again convinced to publicly sidle up to her daughter-in-law as she did during the Diamond Jubilee or decides to give another Royal the nod, Camilla must look as polished and presentable as humanly possible for the occasion. To say she had undergone a Galatea-like transformation in recent years would be a gross understatement. For decades, Camilla’s fashion sense was akin to her taste in furniture—
decidedly English shabby. She favored torn riding pants or dirt-stained jeans, boxy sweaters, scuffed, mud-caked boots, frayed scarves, and frumpy tweeds. Her fingernails were dirty and jagged, her crooked and chipped teeth stained by decades of smoking. Her hair was a brittle tangle of straw, from which one might at any given moment pull out an actual piece of straw.
That began to change dramatically in late 2002, when, at Charles’s urging, Camilla subjected herself to a complete makeover. Despite their shared love of gritty country pursuits like gardening and riding, Charles was also a man of refined tastes who spent well over $100,000 annually on his own bespoke wardrobe. His unwavering conviction about how even the smallest things should be done had servants scrambling. They were instructed that lunch must be served on plates marked with the Prince of Wales crest precisely at twelve o’clock. A cup and saucer were to be placed to the right with a silver spoon pointing outward at a twenty-five-degree angle. The royal toast was always served on a silver rack—never on a plate —with three balls of butter (no more, no less) chilled in a small dish.
Even if His Highness merely asked for a cold drink, staffers knew they were in trouble if he looked into his glass and scowled at what he saw. “He preferred round pieces of ice,” a former valet said, “because he thought the angles made regular cubes ‘too noisy.’ We heard that quite a lot.”
Prince Charles’s valet, Michael Fawcett, was all too painfully familiar with his boss’s idiosyncrasies— and his insistence on being catered to in every conceivable way. Fawcett’s duties included squeezing the toothpaste from a silver dispenser bearing the Prince of Wales crest onto the Prince’s toothbrush, lathering his shaving brush, slipping on and tying the Prince’s shoes, zipping up the royal fly, and even holding the specimen bottle while the Prince of Wales gave a urine sample during regular check-ups.
Things were no different on the road. Charles traveled with his own hand towels, cushioned toilet seat, and toilet paper embroidered with the Prince of Wales crest. There were even written instructions to be passed on to hotel chefs stipulating the “dimensions and texture” of royal sandwiches. Prince Charles’s childhood teddy bear, which always resided in a place of honor amidst the pillows on his canopied four-poster, was also packed up for every trip and then taken out to be tucked under the covers of His Royal Highness’s bed wherever he happened to be. For more than six decades, the only person allowed to mend Prince Charles’s ancient, unraveling teddy was his beloved nanny, Mabel Anderson.
Pampered and demanding— at his own dinner parties he often ate a different meal from his guests, on Prince of Wales plates and using Prince of Wales utensils— Charles grew up being told that, as far as the Royal Family was concerned, appearances were everything. The Prince knew Camilla would have to streamline her look and adopt an entirely new style if she wanted to be a worthy front woman for what members of the Royal Family wryly called “The Firm.” With Charles’s then deputy private secretary and resident media Svengali Mark Bolland overseeing the entire
process, Camilla submitted herself to a handpicked team of dietitians,fitness experts, plastic surgeons, dentists, and cosmetologists. Over a six-month period, Camilla underwent a series of face and neck peels, Botox injections, and laser treatments to erase the wrinkles and lines in her face and neck. She also had her teeth whitened and capped,and even hired a full-time hairdresser, Hugh Green of Belgravia’s swank Hugh and Stephen salon, to tend to her champagne-colored tresses.
Shrinking from a size twelve to a size ten, Camilla also began wearing sleek gowns and chic suits by British designers like Anna Valentine, Antony Price, Bruce Oldfield, and Vivienne Westwood. Each morning, royal dresser Jackie Meakin laid out the day’s wardrobe for Camilla. And each day, Meakin and the Duchess considered how she would look in photographs standing next to the most stylish woman on the planet: the former Kate Middleton. (pgs 35, 36, 37, and 38)
I don't know if I'd call Kate Middleton the most stylish woman on the planet.
NOT ALL OF CHARLES’S WOMEN were plucked from Britain’s upper classes. In 1974 he was so smitten with Laura Jo Watkins, the daughter of American Admiral James Watkins, that he invited her to his maiden speech in the House of Lords. For months he secretly dated the actress Susan George, best known for her turn opposite Dustin Hoffman in the film Straw Dogs.
Then there were the dozens of women introduced to him by friends like Luis Basualdo. Charles’s polo chum drove around the countryside picking up tenant farmers’ daughters—“some seventeen or younger, but I told them to tell Charles they were nineteen”— giving them one hundred pounds (the equivalent in 2015 to well over $1,500) and delivering them to the Prince at Lodsworth House, the Sussex estate owned by Basualdo’s father-in-law. One girl, who worked in a local butcher’s shop, “looked like she was fourteen but she was probably eighteen. Stunning,” Basualdo recalled, “a dead ringer for Mia Farrow.”
Basualdo would bring Charles as many as four girls at a time for the purpose of playing sex games at Lodsworth House. Although the Prince preferred that the girls not be drunk, Basualdo made certain they had had a few drinks before meeting him. Prince Charles’s favorite nocturnal game was “Murder in the Dark,” with Basualdo playing the murderer, Charles the detective, and the girls the victims. Groping about with the lights off, Charles was supposed to pinch the girls in the nose to make them scream. Instead, he would “find a girl, pinch her somewhere naughty, and then start kissing her. It was dark, so he’d throw them on sofas and have sex with them, there and then.”
According to Basualdo, who was also Christina Onassis’s on-again, off-again lover, the two men “shared dozens of girls. Of course I asked some of them what he was like in bed. They would laugh and tell me he was good. I never heard any complaints.” Charles was worried that he might be caught with an underage girl, however, and asked Basualdo to bring him “society girls of twenty-one or twenty-two.” (pgs 75 and 76)
Questionable consent with underage girls, kinda no surprise that the Family tolerated Prince Andrew as long as they did.
At one point, the Prince’s polo teammates, well aware of what he was up to after nearly every match, sneaked into the attic while he was making love to a girl. When he chased them out, they locked the attic door from the outside—trapping him inside. Charles pounded on the door for thirty minutes before Basualdo showed up to let him out. “Do not ever do that to me again,” he shouted. “Do you understand?” (pg 77)
One of his longest and least-known affairs began just weeks after he attended the christening of Tom Parker Bowles. “There was one girl who managed to remain very nearly anonymous,” said Stephen Barry, the prince’s longtime valet. “The Prince saw more of her than anyone realized. Her name was Janet Jenkins, and she was a Welsh girl living in Canada.”
Blonde, thirty-year-old Jenkins was in fact the receptionist at the British consulate in Montreal, and within hours of their first meeting they made love in her apartment while the Prince’s bodyguards stood outside in the hallway. During that and all subsequent encounters, Charles and Jenkins did not use birth control, and it remains unlikely that the Prince of Wales ever considered using contraception with any of his lovers. “Neither of us,” Jenkins conceded, “thought of using protection.” (Inevitably, this laissez-fair attitude toward birth control led to numerous unsubstantiated rumors of abortions and illegitimate children— including Janet’s son Jason, who was born on June 13, 1984, just nine months after one of Jenkins’s sexual encounters with the Prince of Wales. Jenkins, who listed her husband as the father on Jason’s birth certificate, denied that her son was the product of her affair with the future king.)
Over the years, Charles wrote a series of lengthy, torrid love letters to Jenkins, and rearranged his schedule on several occasions so that he could fly to Montreal to be with her. “He always included official functions,” she
later recalled, “so that no one suspected a thing.”
No one except Camilla, whose polo club chums kept her abreast of all the significant players in Charles’s love life. Another was Lady Sarah Spencer, who stuck by Charles even after he abandoned her in the middle of a date to make love to his Colombian bombshell. (pgs 77 and 78)
Gross!
Charles was about to ask Diana to be his wife in late February when his prized racehorse Alibar suddenly collapsed while being exercised and died. Diana immediately drove to the stables to commiserate with Charles, only to discover that he had already turned to Camilla for comfort. (pgs 84 and 85)
“Are you in love?” a reporter asked them.
“Of course,” Diana replied indignantly. But even now, Camilla was never far from Charles’s mind, and he weighed his words carefully. “Whatever ‘in love’ is,” he snickered. Charles conceded to one friend that he was definitely not in love, but that he was going to marry Diana anyway because she had “all the right qualities.” (pg 85)
Charles, unhappy that he was being forced into a marriage he clearly had no enthusiasm for, wasted no time whittling away at his fiancée’s self-confidence. Slipping his arm around her waist, he pinched some skin and cracked, “Oh, a bit chubby here, aren’t we?” —a remark that sent Diana into a downward spiral of depression and bulimia. Forcing herself to vomit five or six times a day, Diana’s waist eventually shrank from twenty-nine to twenty-two inches. (pgs 85 and 86)
At one event, he chastised her for wearing a chic black dress to a charity event in London. “Only mourners wear black,” he sniffed. The remark was heard by Monaco’s Princess Grace, who ushered her into the ladies room, bolted the door, praised her fashion sense, and then listened patiently to Diana’s misgivings about becoming Princess of Wales. “Don’t worry,” Princess Grace said, laughing. “It will get a lot worse!”
Around the same time, before he left for Australia, a playful Diana was sitting on Charles’s lap in his Buckingham Palace office when a call came through from Camilla, who wanted to say goodbye. Diana instinctively left the room so that Charles and Camilla could have a private conversation. Later, Diana said that moment left her “heartbroken,” for it was then that she realized she had a serious rival in Camilla.
As the wedding drew near, Diana— who had always been “Duch” (short for “Duchess”) to family and friends— grew increasingly desperate. Two days before the wedding, she discovered a diamond bracelet Charles had made for Camilla with the intertwined initials F and G, for Fred and Gladys.
“I can’t marry him, I can’t do this,” she told her sisters on the eve of the wedding.
“Well, bad luck, Duch,” they said, pointing out that tens of millions of dollars’ worth of souvenirs bearing the likeness of the newlyweds had already been sold. “Your face is on the tea towels so you’re too late to
chicken out.” (pg 86)
In some ways, it would've been surprising if Diana's life had ended in something other than tragedy.
“YOU’RE CRYING WOLF,” CHARLES SHOUTED as he stormed through the main hall and out the front door of Sandringham in his riding clothes. “I’m not going to listen. You’re always doing this to me.” His wife of two years, now three months pregnant with their first child, stood on the second-floor landing and was vowing to throw herself down the main staircase. “I am so desperate, Charles,” she pleaded. “Please listen to me!”
Over the years, Diana’s unhappiness over Charles’s affair with Camilla would drive her to slash her wrists with a razor, stab herself in the chest with a pocketknife, and hurl herself against a glass display case, cutting herself badly in the process. This, however, was arguably the most spectacular—and dangerous—action she had ever taken to get her husband’s attention.
The Queen and Princess Margaret were on the main floor, overhearing everything as the bitter quarrel that started in the couple’s upstairs rooms spilled into Sandringham’s entrance hall. A blood-chilling scream, followed by the sound of a tumbling body, and the Queen came running to find her daughter-in-law in a heap at the foot of the stairs.
The Queen was, Diana later said, “absolutely horrified. She was so frightened.” Before any footmen arrived, Princess Margaret comforted Diana while the Queen, trembling, called for medical help. Incredibly, Charles just kept right on walking—out the front door and twelve minutes down the road to the stables of the Royal Stud. He would eventually learn that, although the bruises on Diana’s lower abdomen were of concern to her gynecologist, tests showed the fetus had not been harmed. (pgs 88 and 89)
To the outside world, all appeared well in Camelot. A blue-eyed, seven pound, one-and-a-half-ounce heir was born at 9:03 p.m. on June 21—an induced labor timed not to interfere with the Prince’s polo schedule— and the world rejoiced at the arrival of the future king. (pg 89)
William was five and Harry not yet three when Charles moved more or less full-time into Highgrove— away from the city-loving Diana and just twelve minutes from Middlewick House, the eighteenth-century manor Camilla and Andrew Parker Bowles now called home. From this point on, things took an almost comical cloak-and-dagger turn as Charles and Camilla plotted and schemed, clumsily, to conceal their affair from Diana.
On those days when Diana was at Highgrove, Charles would crawl out of his bed to tryst with Camilla just inside the garden walls. Then Charles would creep back into his room, put on a new pair of pajamas— and leave his valet, Ken Stronach, a pile of dirty clothes to deal with.
“There was mud and muck everywhere,” Stronach recalled. “They’d obviously been doing it in the open air.”
On other occasions, when Diana remained in the city, Stronach was instructed to treat Camilla as mistress of the house. A guest room was assigned to her, but after midnight the Prince of Wales would switch off the elaborate alarm system guarding his room so that Camilla could sneak in. Stronach was told to mess up the bed in Camilla’s room so that the servants would think she had slept in it.
Stronach also had orders to personally examine all glassware to make sure there were no lipstick traces, and to empty all ashtrays that the chain-smoking Camilla might have used. Charles always kept a framed photo of Camilla at his bedside; packing it away was on Stronach’s growing list of things to do whenever Diana popped in to Highgrove.
Wielding his considerable influence to make sure that Parker Bowles’s assignments kept him far from home for weeks or months at a time, Charles frequently called on Camilla at Middlewick House. Once Royal Protection officers alerted Camilla that the Prince was on his way, all lights at Middlewick House were switched off so he could pull inside Middlewick’s driveway without being spotted— a bit of espionage Camilla’s servants called “The Blackout.” Since Charles always slept in Camilla’s room and then departed before daylight, they called him “The Prince of
Darkness.”
On one occasion, Diana arrived at Highgrove unannounced to find Charles’s room staged with props: a half-eaten snack, an empty glass of sherry, a folded TV guide with shows circled in pencil— all designed to make it look as if he had just stepped out.
“I mean, really,” she screamed before collapsing on his bed with laughter.
It wasn’t really a laughing matter to Diana, though, and she let Charles know. The Prince was stony and evasive, but when she could corner him their arguments escalated quickly. “Do you know who I am?” he demanded during one shouting match.
“You are a fucking animal!” was Diana’s blunt reply. Doors slammed, crockery and glassware flew indiscriminately, and during one spat an angry Charles hurled his heavy boots against a wall. The couple’s respective bodyguards worried where this all might lead. It was already well established that Diana suffered severe bouts of depression that led her to harm herself. Now Charles was telling royal lawyer Lord Arnold Goodman, “I have nothing to live for.” Goodman went so far as to label the Prince of Wales as “suicidal”— a result of the severe depression he felt over the unraveling of his marriage and the impact it was having on his children. “We went through Highgrove and locked up all the firearms,” a Royal Protection officer said. “We didn’t want anyone getting shot. They were so
angry, it was a real possibility.”
The children were already caught in the crossfire. When Diana, weeping after a particularly bitter row, locked herself in the bathroom, ten-year-old William slipped tissues under the door. “Mummy, don’t cry,” he told her. “I hate to see you sad.”
Camilla commiserated with her lover, but reassured him that Diana would eventually accept the status quo. “Camilla felt that somehow Diana hadn’t caught on to their little game,” a friend of both women said, “and that if she had, she would play by the rules as all royal wives have.”
Kanga Tryon believed Camilla was convinced that “Diana had no choice, that she’d just grow up. What the hell was she going to do? Divorce was not an option. No one thought the Queen would ever allow it.”
Camilla was at her younger sister Annabel’s fortieth birthday party, chatting with Charles and another male guest downstairs, when the party turned very quiet. Suddenly Diana appeared in the room. “Okay, boys,” she said, “I’m just going to have a quick word with Camilla and I’ll be up in a minute.” They shot out of the room, Diana later said, “like chickens with no heads.” She sensed “all hell breaking loose” among the partygoers upstairs, and she was right. Charles had no idea what his unpredictable wife was up to, and he feared the worst.
Charles’s wife got straight to the point. “Camilla,” she said, “I would just like you to know that I know exactly what is going on between you and Charles. I wasn’t born yesterday.”
Camilla’s hands were trembling; the ice in her vodka and tonic clinked loudly. Had she obeyed proper protocol, the woman Diana derisively called “The Rottweiler” would have curtsied the moment Diana entered the room. Aside from being the most famous woman on the planet, Diana outranked every woman in the realm except for the Queen and the Queen Mother.
Instead, Camilla demanded to know why Diana refused to simply look the other way. “You’ve got everything you ever wanted,” she said pleadingly. “You’ve got all the men in the world to fall in love with you and you’ve got two beautiful children. What more do you want?”
Taken aback by Camilla’s impudence, Diana shouted back, “I want my husband. 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.”
Curiously, the confrontation between the two women did not have the intended consequences. Rather than feel contrite, Charles saw Camilla as the victim, and upbraided Diana for her “monstrous” behavior. While a devastated Diana wept over the hopelessness of her situation, Camilla now saw in Diana a worthy adversary. If the Princess could not be mollified, then a formal separation was indeed possible— and with it the possibility of even more time with Charles. “Charles does not like to be pushed,” Janet Jenkins said. “Diana pushed too far, and Camilla took advantage of that.” (pgs 93, 94, 95, 96, and 97)
I truly hope that Diana seriously did say that to him.
(pg 99 and 100)A turning point came the following month, when Diana was lunching with a friend at her favorite London restaurant, San Lorenzo, and Charles was once again cozying up to Camilla at Highgrove. William and his classmates had been practicing on the putting green at Ludgrove when one of the other boys took a wild swing and accidentally clocked the young Prince full-force in the forehead. Knocked cold, with blood spurting from the wound in his head, William was taken in a police car to nearby Royal Berkshire Hospital.
According to Highgrove housekeeper Wendy Berry, Charles was “white with shock” at the news. Both he and Diana rushed to William’s bedside, then accompanied him as he was transferred by ambulance to London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital. There, he was to undergo an operation that would check for bone splinters and fully ascertain the damage. The operation required twenty-four stitches and left William with a permanent four-inch-long scar running horizontally above his left eye.
Diana held William’s hand as he was wheeled into surgery and waited until neurosurgeon Richard Hayward emerged to pronounce the seventy five-minute operation a success. Charles, however, was nowhere in sight. He had consulted with Camilla and they both agreed there was nothing to be accomplished by his remaining at Great Ormond Street Hospital. Leaving his son in the hands of the professionals, he had gone ahead with plans to attend a performance of Tosca at Covent Garden, telling his guests in the royal box that William’s condition was “not too bad.” From the opera, he took a train to an environmental conference in North Yorkshire.
Meanwhile, a distraught and exhausted Diana, still concerned that the injury might have some lingering effects—primarily infection leading to epilepsy or meningitis—stayed with William at Great Ormond Street. “Her reaction to William’s accident was horror and disbelief,” said Diana’s friend James Gilbey. “By all accounts it was a narrow escape. She can’t understand her husband’s behavior.”
Neither could the British public, which was quickly consumed with rage over what it saw as Charles’s callous indifference to the well-being of his own son. WHAT KIND OF DAD ARE YOU? screamed the headline in the next day’s Sun. (pg 99 and 100)
Neither the Queen nor Diana— nor Camilla, for that matter— were aware that, while the realm was still reeling from the disclosures in Andrew Morton’s book, Charles was enjoying another illicit rendezvous with Janet Jenkins at Highgrove. For more than four hours, Jenkins, whose son, Jason, was now eight, held Charles’s hand and listened patiently as the Prince complained bitterly about his relentlessly demanding wife and the toll their rancorous breakup was taking on the children. Charles was, Jenkins recalled, “consumed with worry over the psychological health of the boys— how all the fighting and bitterness would affect them in later
life.”
When he was done, Charles and his Canadian mistress tumbled into bed together— “the last time we were sexually intimate,” said Jenkins, who insisted that at that point she was unaware that Camilla was still in the Prince’s life. Jenkins later conceded that it was “ironic” that Charles was “cheating on his mistress with me!” (pg 105 and 106)
So yeah, the whole "kept from his true love!" thing is bullshit, at least in terms of Charles's fidelity.
Among items contained in Diana’s “Box of Secrets” was her taped interview with
Kensington Palace valet and footman George Smith. On the tape, Smith told Diana he was raped by one of Charles’s most trusted servants— and that he had witnessed this same servant and a member of the Royal Family in a position that could only be described as compromising.
Diana had taken the tape to Charles and demanded that the alleged rapist be fired. Not only did the Prince of Wales dismiss the charge as “staff tittle-tattle,” but he went on to spend nearly $200,000 covering the purported rapist’s legal bills. Eventually, Smith dropped the matter after departing the Palace with a $59,000 cash payment—all of which, understandably, gave rise to charges of a cover-up.
The Daily Mail’s full-page headline, I WAS RAPED BY CHARLES’S SERVANT, left little to the imagination, and it was hard to argue with the sentiment in the follow-up headline, PANIC GRIPS THE PALACE. “They’ve really kicked the hornet’s nest, haven’t they?” the Queen muttered while scanning the papers. She had always been aware of the X-rated goings on inside palace walls, and it was no secret that, like her mother, the Queen had a taste for
gossip of even the most salacious variety.
Rape was another matter entirely. When the Queen summoned Charles to Balmoral to explain what he knew about the newest royal scandal, the Prince turned for advice to the woman he now called “My Touchstone”— Camilla.
From the grave, Diana had struck yet another blow to Charles’s reputation. It was the sort of public relations fiasco both he and Camilla could ill afford— not if they had any hope of selling themselves as a royal couple. For a fleeting moment, it may well have occurred to Charles and Camilla that one of the infamous Men in Gray was behind this latest batch of humiliating revelations.
“Buckingham Palace and St. James’s Palace have been at war with each other for a long, long time,” said one courtier. “Charles’s advisors are constantly pushing to give him more to do, to get him on the throne sooner rather than later.” But, he added, “there are also people close to the Queen who strongly believe that Charles will be a total disaster as king.” Operation PB, the Mark Bolland–engineered campaign to revamp Camilla’s image, simply “poured gasoline on the fire.” (pgs 193 and 194)
___________________________________________________________________
It wouldn't be a Christopher Andersen book without scheming women. So have some!
THE WEDDING OF THE TWENTIETH Century took place on July 29, 1981, at St. Paul’s Cathedral and was witnessed by a worldwide television audience of 750 million people. Feeling like “a lamb to the slaughter,” Diana walked down the aisle knowing all eyes were on her. But as she approached the altar, her eyes were trained on Camilla—“pale gray, veiled pillbox hat, saw it all, her son Tom standing on a chair...”
Another guest, Charles’s Canadian paramour Janet Jenkins, watched Camilla closely as well. For years, their shared lover had always talked to Jenkins about “how wonderful Camilla was— he never spoke of Diana.” Jenkins knew that Charles “was in love with only one woman and that was Camilla. She was pulling the strings and the levers, definitely.”
At the wedding, Jenkins was “fascinated to get a look at this woman he preferred to his gorgeous young bride. Camilla had this cool, Cheshire cat grin as she watched them march down the aisle. She just seemed so
delighted with the whole arrangement.”
From the very start, Diana later said, “there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.” Yet when she looked at Camilla on her wedding day, something “clicked” inside her. “I desperately wanted it to work. I desperately loved my husband, and I wanted to share everything together.... Here was a fairy story that everyone wanted to work.”
As far as Camilla was concerned, the fairy story was working splendidly— just as she planned it. Both she and Kanga Tryon were convinced that in Diana they had a pretty, guileless, malleable child who would bend to the ways of her elders. “Diana is a very sweet girl,” Camilla told Harold Brooks-Baker, “and she will give Charles beautiful children.” Diana’s friend Lady Elsa Bowker even recalled Camilla, whose passion for horses was surpassed only by the Queen’s, favorably comparing the Princess of Wales to a “beautiful brood mare.”
Willingly, even eagerly casting herself in the role of royal mistress, Camilla had already proven herself adept at maneuvering courtiers, courtesans, and even members of the Royal Family like so many pieces on a chessboard. Everyone was right where she wanted them— or so Camilla believed. “Diana moved into Kensington Palace like she was supposed to,” Elsa Bowker recalled, “and they told her to do what they said, what the Queen wanted.”
Diana had other plans. “They thought of me as a blank slate,” Diana told Lady Bowker, “and they didn’t expect someone like me could possibly have a mind of her own. They were wrong.” (pg 87 and 88)
The twentieth century had entered its final decade, and Diana was now intent on seeing her son William crowned the next monarch— not Charles. Toward that end, she would wage a public relations campaign to discredit her husband.
Part of the plan involved portraying Charles as an uncaring, uninvolved father.
THE WORLD KNEW OF DIANA’S love for her children; their trips to theme parks, movie theaters, and fast-food restaurants— all designed to give William and Harry something akin to a “normal” childhood— were well documented by
the press. So, too, were visits to hospitals and homeless shelters that Diana hoped would instill in the young princes a sense of compassion and civic responsibility.
Less well-publicized was Charles’s own warm and nurturing relationship with his sons. Like his parents before him, the Prince eschewed public displays of affection, deeming them undignified, unmanly, and, in the words of one courtier, “unworthy of a royal personage. They are all that way. Prince Philip is the worst.”
Yet behind closed doors, Charles clearly relished the time spent with his frisky young sons. When William and Harry were toddlers, he got down on the floor for playtime, read them bedtime stories, and even joined them in the bath, commanding a fleet of toy boats and yellow rubber ducks.
As the boys grew older, Diana engaged them at least twice a week in ferocious, to-the-death pillow fights. Not to be outdone, Charles concocted a game called Big Bad Wolf. The rules: Papa stood in the center of the room, and William and Harry would try to get out. As they scrambled for the door, Charles snatched them up and tossed them on the couch. Then they’d bolt for the door again, only to be sent flying by Big Bad Wolf Papa— much to their squealing delight. Similar games were played during summer weekends at Highgrove, with Papa alternately tossing his sons into the pool, carrying them on his shoulders, and challenging them to furious splash-fights.
Charles was so smitten with the boys that he wanted to buck royal tradition and not send them to boarding school at the age of eight. Instead, he told Diana he wanted William and Harry to simply continue at Wetherby, the day school located at Notting Hill Gate, just five minutes from Kensington Palace. “I think sending small children to boarding
school is an appalling tradition— singularly British,” agreed Penelope Leach, the noted British child care expert. “Eight is awfully young for any child to be away from his parents.”
But Diana, claiming that Royal Protection officers felt it would be easier to protect the boys at boarding school, signed William up for Ludgrove, an exclusive school in Wokingham, Berkshire. There William, and later Harry, slept eight to a room in spartan dormitories with peeling paint on the walls and cold, bare wooden floors. There was no television, not even radio.
“I wanted them to stay home where I could spend time with them,” Charles told Janet Jenkins. “I know Diana was upset about sending them off to Ludgrove, but it was more important to her that I be shown who had
the power. She wanted to hurt me by sending the boys away, and she did.” (pgs 97, 98, and 99)
All of the Royal Family use and used the media, Diana was just good at it and thus vilified accordingly in books like this.
CAMILLA HAD SERIOUSLY UNDERESTIMATED HER rival. According to Jenkins, Charles’s mistress told him that Diana was “cold and calculating” in her ability to manipulate public opinion, to get the press to “tell the story she wants to tell, whether it’s the truth or not.”
“Cold” was the adjective that Diana most often used to describe her husband— and his family. It seemed to Diana that William and Harry, now nine and seven respectively, were just beginning to get an inkling of what she meant. “Diana used to say, ‘They are all so cold. They have no heart,’” her friend Lady Elsa Bowker said. During visits to Buckingham Palace, Windsor, Sandringham, even Balmoral, the little princes now seemed to pay more attention to the fact that every grown-up without exception— including generals in uniform and important government leaders like the
Prime Minister— bowed to Granny. More than that, most of them seemed tense and apprehensive around her.
“William and Harry could see them all bowing, everyone afraid to do or say the wrong thing in Her Majesty’s presence,” Bowker continued. “Their grandfather Prince Philip having to walk behind their grandmother— for two small boys, it was very intimidating.” It was indeed a lesson, but one that Diana was determined they learn, even at this early date.
The brothers began to understand that “it was more than just respect for the Queen that made people bow and scrape,” Bowker said. “It was fear.” (pg 100 and 101)
It's... literally a system of monarchy?
In the ensuing months there was an uninterrupted stream of newspaper stories linking Diana to a variety of men, including British businessman Christopher Whalley, rugby player Will Carling (his wife accused Diana of ruining her marriage), Canadian rocker Bryan Adams, and suave American billionaire Theodore Forstmann.
There were countless other male admirers, from electronics tycoon Gulu Lalvani to legendary tenors Placido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti. She also had a schoolgirl crush on Tom Cruise, who invited Diana to bring William to watch him film Mission Impossible at Pinewood Studios. She told her hairdressers Natalie Symonds and Tess Rock that she wouldn’t mind if Cruise’s then-wife Nicole Kidman was “out of the way. Nicole keeps giving me dagger eyes.”
Diana also said she “adored” then President Bill Clinton and found his “southern drawl” to be “incredibly sexy.” She was surprised, however, how nervous he seemed to be in the presence of the First Lady. Hillary, she told Symonds and Rock, “certainly is the one who wears the pants in that family.”
The Princess of Wales was also smitten with King Constantine’s eldest son, Prince Pavlos. When Pavlos married American heiress Marie-Chantal Miller, Diana was “devastated,” said Symonds. Diana was convinced she would never be Queen of England, but, she said, “there’s no reason I can’t be Queen of Greece.”
In the end, the man who won Diana’s heart was chubby, chain-smoking Pakistani heart surgeon Hasnat “Natty” Khan. She became so obsessed with Khan that she donned scrubs to watch him perform operations at London’s Royal Brompton Hospital. The couple also had a code name for Diana to leave whenever she called to speak to him while he was doing his rounds. “Please tell Dr. Khan,” she would tell the receptionist, “that Dr. Allegra is trying to reach him.”
“She became so devoted to Hasnat,” Symonds recalled, “that she said she at last began to understand the undying love Prince Charles shared with Camilla. She was wildly in love, totally obsessed by Dr. Khan.”
The affair with Khan was tempestuous, even by Diana’s standards. Yet Khan was, Diana told her friend Tess Rock, “everything to me— the love of my life.... He’s got no money, I’ll have to keep him, but I’ve got a thing
about doctors.” (pg 114 and 115)
A quick note about portraying Diana as a catty, all-women-are-jealous-of-me mantrapper: she got on so well with Hillary Clinton (some fawning recollections note pictures from Diana's White House visit makes the two women look as though they're sisters) that such disparate entities as both the Royal Family and Diana's siblings invited Clinton to her funeral, and she also befriended both Kidman and Cruise, both of whom also attended her funeral. I get painting a nuanced portrayal, but this level of cartoonish internalized misogyny doesn't seem to be supported by the facts. Did she say those things to friends and still get on well with both Hillary Clinton and Nicole Kidman? Maybe. Did she say them as a joke? Maybe.
William also asked if he and Harry could meet her when she arrived at Heathrow— a homecoming that was sure to create a scrum of photographers at the airport.
“Of course,” the Princess instantly replied. In stark contrast to her in-laws’ stiff formality, Diana was famous for running to her children and sweeping them up with bear hugs and kisses. She also knew that those heartwarming images would again be splashed across the front pages of newspapers worldwide. After cavorting with Dodi on the Riviera and in Paris, Diana wanted to remind the Queen, Charles, and the world at large of her place in the Royal Family— and, as the mother of a future king, her role in shaping the monarchy. “Diana was Merlin— an absolute wizard— when it came to manipulating the media,” said veteran Times of London correspondent Alan Hamilton, a favorite of the Royal Family. “The Queen, in particular, was in awe of this.” (pg 148)
Yes, the Queen was in awe because she (and again, all of the Royal Family) were trying to do the same thing.
EVEN BEFORE A CAR CRASH in Paris changed the trajectory of British history, Camilla made it clear that she was no longer content to someday simply be the King’s mistress. Following the divorce of Charles and Diana, “Camilla started plotting to become the next queen,” Lady Bowker said. “She thought the most she could hope for was to someday be the King’s mistress, but now Diana was out of the way and Camilla wanted more.”
The media summit at Highgrove kicked off what became, according to Diana’s private secretary Patrick Jephson, “a sustained political-style spin that hijacked Charles’s reputation to serve the needs of his true love’s
ambition.”
Incredibly, less than two weeks after that critical meeting with Mark Bolland and Peter Mandelson—and only two months before Diana’s death— Camilla caused a car crash that left her injured and nearly killed another woman, then fled the scene. A notoriously fast and not necessarily cautious driver, Camilla was speeding toward Highgrove one evening when she plowed into a car driven by fifty-three-year-old interior designer Carolyn Melville-Smith. “That car was going hellish fast,” Melville-Smith recalled. “The next thing I knew the other car was flying through the air and I was in a ditch.” Trapped inside, Melville-Smith cried for help, but to no avail.
Camilla called Prince Charles on her cellphone, then walked over to look at the other vehicle. From the road, she could make out that the car was tipped on its side and that someone was behind the wheel. Rather than doing anything to help, Camilla screamed, panicked, and ran away. The Royal Protection officers Charles dispatched to the scene found the Prince of Wales’s mistress sitting by her car at the side of the road, rocking back and forth, smoking a cigarette, and sobbing. Other passing motorists, meanwhile, stopped to help Melville-Smith and summoned police and an ambulance, which took her to a local hospital to be treated for minor scrapes and bruises. Camilla was given a breathalyzer test on the spot, which she passed, and was taken to Highgrove to be treated for a minor
concussion and a badly twisted wrist. In the meantime, no one bothered to tell Melville-Smith who the other driver was.
St. James’s Palace was pleased to see the next day’s newspaper articles headlined CAMILLA THE HEROINE telling the story of how Mrs. Parker Bowles came upon a crash victim and pulled her to safety. Once Melville-Smith realized that the other driver was none other than Mrs. Parker Bowles, she hurried to set the record straight. Camilla was no hero, she angrily insisted. “I was trapped in my car, yelling for help, and she did not come,” Melville-Smith said. “I could have been badly hurt and she just left me there.” Authorities were still looking into the possibility of filing criminal reckless driving charges against Camilla when Diana was killed. Out of deference to the Prince of Wales, prosecutors decided not to pursue legal action against his mistress in the immediate aftermath of the crash that took his ex-wife’s life. (pgs 161 and 162)
....Damn.
To underscore Camilla’s potential as a representative of the monarchy, Charles dispatched her on a high-profile solo trip to New York. With the Prince’s media spinmeister Mark Bolland at her elbow, Camilla was photographed with the likes of philanthropy queen Brooke Astor, designer Oscar de la Renta, Vogue editor Anna Wintour, media tycoon Michael Bloomberg, and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. Astor, then
ninety-seven, had actually met Camilla’s great-grandmother Alice Keppel in the 1930s, more than two decades after Edward VII’s death. By then the late King’s mistress, who had never actually been considered a beauty, was shunned by society and had begun her descent into alcoholism. “Mrs. Parker Bowles wanted to know everything, but at the time most people believed Mrs. Keppel to be a wanton woman and a schemer,” Astor later said. “She ended up a rather pathetic figure. I thought it best to change the subject, considering.” (pgs 185 and 186)
Before embarking on his next adventure, William returned to London, only to face another, wholly unexpected challenge. Diana’s former private secretary, Patrick Jephson, had published Shadows of a Princess, a scathing indictment of the Princess that portrayed her as shrewd, unstable, and manipulative.
With permission from both Charles and the Queen, William gave his first-ever press conference to defend his mother’s memory. Incredibly, the Press Complaints Commission had done such a splendid job of keeping journalists at bay that this marked the first time the public had actually heard William’s voice. The Heir allowed that both he and Harry were “quite upset” about Jephson’s book— that “our mother’s trust has been betrayed and that even now she is still being exploited.”
One person in particular delighted in anything that portrayed Diana as an emotionally unbalanced Machiavellian schemer. The implications for Camilla’s own standing in terms of public opinion were glaringly obvious. At one of their small Highgrove gatherings, Charles railed against Jephson, only to have Camilla blurt out, “Well, yes, darling, but it is all true, isn’t it?” (pg 188)
Scheming women ON TOP OF scheming women!
NO ONE APPRECIATED KATE’S GUMPTION more than Camilla, who became serious about staking her permanent claim on the Prince long before their nuptials. Starting back in 2002, when the Queen’s trusted treasurer Sir Michael Peat became Prince Charles’s private secretary, Camilla ramped up her efforts to be publicly seen and accepted as the next sovereign’s rightful life companion.
Even as she promoted an image of herself in the media as a guileless, garden-tending matron, Camilla furiously battled senior courtiers behind the scenes. According to former members of the Prince of Wales’s staff, she spent hours strategizing with spin doctors, leaking self-aggrandizing stories to the press, sniping at perceived foes, and currying favor with the Crown. “Despite her carefully cultivated image as the comfortable countrywoman,” Patrick Jephson said, “Mrs. PB operates a high-powered PR strategy.”
As far as Camilla was concerned, the small slights added up. When Charles attended a community event in Derbyshire to mark Shrove Tuesday, he was pointedly informed the invitation did not extend to Camilla. Later, the Prince of Wales was asked to attend a Shakespeare tribute evening at London’s Globe Theater for his charity, the Prince’s Trust—and again, she was omitted. This time, she showed up anyway.
Before their marriage, at a celebrity-packed Fashion Rocks gala at London’s Albert Hall honoring Charles, Camilla materialized at his side. Again, she had made the bold decision to defy the Prince’s own senior staffers, who feared the unpopular Mrs. PB would be an unwelcome distraction at a time when Charles needed as much goodwill as he could muster.
Such bitter rows between Camilla and Charles’s inner circle of seven top advisors (out of the Prince of Wales’s total staff of 125) were common. Diana had called the St. James’s crew who catered to her husband “The Enemy.” Now that Camilla had essentially replaced Diana, she called her husband’s advisors— yes, “The Enemy.” (Camilla had a special nickname for her nemesis Sir Michael Peat: “The Bidet, because you know what it’s called, you just don’t know what it’s for.”)
Camilla kept a close eye on those farther down the food chain as well. Secretaries and clerks, housekeepers and bodyguards— anyone employed in the service of the Prince of Wales was subject to Camilla’s whim. Women she felt threatened by were, for obvious reasons, particularly vulnerable. Sarah Goodhall had been answering Prince Charles’s correspondence for more than a decade when Camilla arranged for her to be invited for a week’s vacation at Birkhall. Camilla was careful to sit next to the thirty-four-year-old secretary at dinner and engage her in conversation about everything from their shared love of horses to their cancer-stricken mothers.
Once Goodhall returned to the office, however, things were very different. Camilla had complained to Goodhall’s superior, Mark Bolland, that the staffer had been too flirtatious with Prince Charles. “Camilla had made it clear she did not want me working there,” Goodhall said.
Similarly, Camilla eased [nursemaid] Tiggy Legge-Bourke out of the picture, as well as several other female employees she felt might pose a threat to her relationship with the Prince. As in every other area, when it came hiring and firing staff Camilla had the upper hand. “Prince Charles,” Goodhall said, “is not strong enough to say no to Camilla.”
“The ambition that has brought Camilla this far has not died,” observed Jephson, who accused Camilla of routinely “trampling on underlings” and continually leaking stories to the press to serve her own purposes. “Camilla is deliberately orchestrating events and setting the media agenda.”
Now that the Prince of Wales was well into his fifties, it seemed to everyone who knew him that he needed Camilla more than ever. “Every sinew of his organization and every shred of royal dignity,” Jephson said, had been “subordinated to the task of getting her into his life.” Now that she was, “the whole apparatus, instead of being dismantled, is being refueled and rearmed to get her on to the throne.” In the meantime, Camilla’s modus operandi was, Jephson went on, “drawn from every shelf of the spin doctor’s medicine cupboard, and from some pretty dark
corners, too.”
Camilla reached into those dark corners, according to Jephson, Richard Kay, and others, principally to defame Diana’s memory. “Many of the friends who conspired in Charles’s and Camilla’s extramarital affairs,” Jephson said, “who conceived and executed their mission plan for public acceptability, would happily wish away Diana’s achievements.” Agreed Diana’s friend Vivienne Parry: “It feels like there’s a conspiracy to forget
Diana.” (pgs 220, 221, 222, and 223)
Polls taken just before the wedding of Charles and Camilla showed that 74 percent of all Britons believed that the Queen and other members of the Royal Family had “deliberately avoided” mentioning Diana’s name since her death. Earl Spencer believed that his sister’s memory was being “marginalized” by the Royal Family, and that there was an orchestrated effort to “tell people she never mattered, that in the first week of September 1997 they were all suffering from mass hysteria.” Certainly the Queen and her husband came in for more than their share of criticism on this score. When it was proposed that Heathrow be renamed in Diana’s honor, Elizabeth promptly vetoed the idea. The Queen also nixed a proposal to commission a large statue of Diana to be placed outside Kensington Palace. What the public did not know was that, in both cases, Camilla convinced Charles to lobby his mother against these ideas on the grounds that they were “tasteless.” In determining what was an appropriate memorial for Diana, the Queen relied heavily on Charles’s opinion.
..........
YET THERE WAS A GROWING feeling that all the damaging stories about Diana’s emotional instability, her manipulative behavior, and her sordid affairs were part of a larger orchestrated effort to slander the late Princess. The Queen and Prince Philip in particular, said writer Nicholas Davies, were guilty of trying to “besmirch the name and memory of the People’s Princess by leaking and spreading disturbing innuendos that she was mentally ill.”
Camilla was careful to express heartfelt concern for William and Harry every time a once-trusted employee or confidant of Diana’s unleashed another book or tabloid series on the reading public. Yet in private she gleefully devoured Paul Burrell’s revelations— sold to the Daily Mirror for $468,000— about Diana’s obsession with Hasnet Khan (at one point she considering tricking him into marriage by becoming pregnant) and books like Diana: Closely Guarded Secret, in which Royal Protection officer Ken Wharfe revealed that Diana always kept a vibrator in her handbag. At home, she called it “le gadget”; packed away in a suitcase whenever she traveled, the vibrator was Diana’s “secret mascot.”
More than once, servants came upon Camilla reading the more titillating passages aloud to friends and then “howling” with laughter. “Every time there was another scandalous story about Diana it was horribly painful for William and Harry,” said one. “They felt terribly betrayed, as you can imagine. But for Camilla, any nasty thing anyone could say or write about Diana was pure gold.”
James Hewitt gave Charles’s mistress plenty to work with when he tried to sell sixty-four steamy love letters from Diana to the now-defunct News of the World for more than $16 million. In several of the letters, Diana
referred to Hewitt’s penis as “my friend.” Indeed, each juicy new tell-all memoir or leaked tidbit “peeled away the layers of the myth until nothing was left,” said a former aide to Prince Charles. “That was the objective— to allow Diana’s memory to be debased to such an extent that Camilla looked good by comparison.”
“People often say that Camilla is such a sweet and uncomplicated woman, but all you have to do is look at how she plots, schemes— the deception,” Lady Elsa Bowker remarked. “She despised Diana in life, and I think even more so in death, because Diana was even more beloved for her kindness in death.”
With Charles’s help— and the benign acquiescence of the Queen— a number of figures in the sovereign’s inner circle were enlisted to join in the Diana-bashing. The Queen’s friend Lady Kennard branded Diana “very damaged” and “impossible to understand.” Another of Her Majesty’s pals and a former lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother, Lady Penn, mentioned that Diana may have suffered some “mental instability.” One of Charles’s closest allies, Countess Mountbatten, chimed in that Diana “had a side the public never saw,” while her sister Lady Pamela Hicks called Diana “spiteful” and “truly unkind.” With a nod to Camilla, Lady Hicks later said Prince Charles had “blossomed” in the years since Diana’s death.
Airbrushing Diana from history entirely would nonetheless prove to be an impossible task. Whatever she said or did behind closed doors, the Queen, who still suffered flashbacks to the days when Diana’s death imperiled the monarchy, was careful to never utter a negative word about her late daughter-in-law in public. At the dedication of the modest Diana Fountain in Hyde Park in July 2004, the Princess’s boys struggled to contain their emotions as the Queen spoke of an England “coming to terms with the loss, united by an extraordinary sense of shock, grief, and sadness.” She went on to praise Diana “especially for the happiness she gave my two grandsons. I cannot forget... the Diana who made such an impact on our lives.” (pgs 223, 224, 225, and 226)
All that is... certainly a lot.
At Charles’s insistence, Kate was among a small group invited to Highgrove to celebrate the Prince of Wales’s fifty-sixth birthday. Ever the charming hostess, Camilla paid special attention to Kate that evening, doing her best to make William’s girlfriend feel comfortable and welcome. “Mrs. Parker Bowles,” Kate later told her parents, “couldn’t have been nicer. She’s very warm— a kind of earth mother type, really.”
Appearances were deceiving. Camilla had been closely monitoring William’s love life since his final year at Eton, and actively campaigning for William to marry an aristocrat— ideally someone from one of the royal houses of Europe. Camilla had also used the resources available to her through St. James’s Palace to find out all she could about Kate’s working-class background—from her family’s roots in the coal fields of County Durham through to Kate’s flight attendant mother and the mail-order empire she built as a supplier of children’s party favors.
Camilla was profoundly unimpressed. Based on reports she was getting from mutual friends in Berkshire, Carole Middleton sounded gauche and pushy, lacking in background and breeding. To top it off, Kate’s self-made mother was an unrepentant chain smoker who chewed gum furiously whenever she wasn’t permitted to light up. Since having to give up cigarettes cold turkey to please Charles and the Queen, Camilla had come to view smoking as the nastiest of habits. “Like a lot of ex-smokers,” said a former Highgrove staffer, “she couldn’t stand to see anyone else smoke. She said the smell made her sick. It was rather funny, since she blew smoke in other people’s faces for fifty years.” (Further complicating the issue was the fact that both William and Harry smoked whenever they were out of camera range. Camilla, unwilling to appear as if she were trying to take Diana’s place as a mother figure, refused Charles’s repeated request to talk with the boys about quitting.)
Putting Kate’s up-by-the-bootstraps family background aside, what did Mrs. Parker Bowles think of William’s girlfriend as a person? To Camilla, Kate seemed “pretty, but rather dim.”
“Beneath it all,” says a friend of the Parker Bowleses, “Camilla is a snob. Her family has always moved in royal circles. It’s simply second nature to her. She simply felt Kate and the Middletons were too lowly to marry into
the Royal Family.” After waiting more than thirty years to be openly accepted by the Queen, the friend went on, “she wasn’t going to have someone just march in and sort of drag the whole thing down. Like I said, Camilla is really an awful snob.”
She was also someone who had learned to love the limelight. Now that the press had fallen in love with Kate and was pursuing her everywhere, Camilla was apparently jealous of the attention she was getting. “Members of the Royal Family simply cannot stand being upstaged,” Richard Kay said. “Charles hated it when the press trampled over him to get to Diana, and it only makes sense that Camilla resented being eclipsed by a beautiful young woman like Kate Middleton.”
Yet there was nothing Camilla could do to keep Kate from sharing the spotlight with William when they graduated from St. Andrews on June 23, 2005. The Queen had been sick for a week with the flu, but she showed up anyway along with Prince Philip. It was a first for the Duke of Edinburgh, who had never attended the graduation ceremonies for any of his own children. (pgs 226, 227 and 228)
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Given that Prince Harry has been making himself quite known in the press the past few years, giving bombshell interviews, documentaries, and a bestselling memoir, to see how he's portrayed here (as a troublesome, clueless party-boy rather than the depressed, anxious mess badly coping with trauma from his mother's death he later declared himself to be) is interesting.
Three days later, Charles penned a letter to “My Dearest Diana,” asking if Harry, already held back one year, should stay an additional year at Ludgrove before joining William at Eton. No intellectual match for the Heir, the Spare had been struggling with his grades. The Prince signed the letter “Lots of love, Charles,” and then told his secretary to put it on Diana’s desk at Kensington Palace so she would have it as soon as she returned to London. (pg 147)
Late that afternoon, Prince William called from Balmoral. If Diana had been thinking of marrying Dodi, as Fleet Street speculated and the Queen deeply feared, she would have talked it over with her “little old wise man”— the one person whose opinion on all such things she valued most— William. She didn’t. Instead, the conversation centered on Harry, and whether a photo opportunity being set up at Eton to mark the beginning of William’s third year there would make the Spare feel awkward and “ignored.” (pg 147)
Their life in St. Andrews was now more serene, private, and cosseted than ever. But William’s bar-hopping, binge-drinking forays into London— where he usually joined forces with his hard-partying brother— were another matter. When British tabloids ran photos of the drunken princes openly groping women at bars in central London, Carole [Middleton] called her daughter to reassure her that the stories were probably blown out of proportion. But if Kate wanted to spend more time with William in London, Carole also made it clear that the Middletons’ Chelsea flat was at her disposal. “Carole was afraid,” said a Goldsmith cousin, “that he was
losing interest and slipping right through Kate’s fingers. (pg 220)
They proved it again later that summer during the London Olympics. As the “Official Ambassadors” of Team GB (Great Britain), they showed up in the stands to cheer for their countrymen, and whenever Team GB won a race or scored a point, leaped to their feet and hugged each other. It was impossible to top the Queen’s performance at the opening ceremonies, however. Being picked up by Daniel Craig at Buckingham Palace and then “parachuted” into the stadium made Her Majesty “an awfully hard act to follow,” cracked Prince Harry.
Somehow, Harry managed. Between army deployments in Afghanistan, the Spare decided to spend part of August living it up in Las Vegas. Unfortunately, what happened there didn’t stay there. Photographs of Harry frolicking nude with a young woman during a game of strip billiards were leaked by the celebrity website TMZ and were soon splashed across the pages of tabloids everywhere.
No sooner had Harry issued one of his all-too-familiar profuse apologies than Kate suddenly found herself at the center of her own media firestorm. (pgs 274 and 275)
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Charles sucks, but Phillip sucked first.
Charles could scarcely turn to his father for comfort. If anything, Philip was even more distant and unloving than his wife. In later years, he would go on record describing his father as rigid, authoritarian, cold, bullying, and “undemonstrative—incapable of sensitivity or tenderness.” (The Duke of Edinburgh was apparently quite capable of being demonstrative with members of the opposite sex, however. He had a particular fondness for actresses and showgirls, and his affair with one— British theater star Pat Kirkwood— was rumored to have lasted more than twenty-five years.)
Elizabeth was well aware of her husband’s roving eye. Early on during the courtship, she was within earshot when one of Philip’s dancing partners— a particularly naive young aristocrat— proclaimed loudly that it was “terribly uncomfortable dancing with Philip. That torch [flashlight] he insists on carrying in his pocket keeps jabbing me in the stomach. I’ve heard the other girls complain about it, too.” (pgs 53 and 54)
Yikes. Again, Prince Andrew?
In ways both subtle and surprisingly direct, the Queen was sending the message that her retirement was imminent— if not around the time of her ninetieth birthday celebration in 2016, then after the death of the Duke of Edinburgh. For sixty-four years, he had dutifully walked several paces behind his wife, arms folded behind his back as if he were pacing the deck of a ship—just as he had when he served with distinction in the navy during World War II. “My job first, second, and last,” he once said, “is never to let the Queen down.”
Perhaps. But Philip was known for his temper, his impatience, his often brusque demeanor— and his public gaffes. “Damn fool question!” Philip snapped when a BBC reporter politely asked the Queen if she was enjoying her stay in Paris. When he met Sir Michael Bishop, then chairman of Britain’s Channel 4 television network, Philip said, “So you’re responsible for the kind of crap Channel 4 produces!”
With the press looking on, he once asked a Scottish driving instructor,“How do you keep your natives off the booze long enough to get them through the test?” On a separate trip to Scotland, he drew the ire of the Indian community when he said a fuse box looked “as though it was put in by an Indian.” Confronted about the comment, he stuttered, “I meant to say cowboys. I just got my cowboys and Indians mixed up.”
“Aren’t most of you descended from pirates?” he inquired when visiting the Cayman Islands. On a trip to Australia, he asked an aboriginal leader, “Do you still throw spears at each other?” To the president of Nigeria, who met the Prince wearing traditional dress: “You look like you’re ready for bed.”
While touring China, Prince Philip told a visiting British student, “If you stay here much longer you’ll go home with slitty eyes.” The Queen’s spouse went on to declare Beijing “ghastly”— the same word he publicly used to describe any number of industrial cities and suburban towns he visited in England over the years. At a ceremony for his Duke of Edinburgh youth awards program, Philip told the audience that “young people are the same as they always were— just as ignorant.” When a student parking attendant failed to recognize him during a tour of Cambridge University, Philip blurted out, “You bloody silly fool!”
The Duke of Edinburgh’s lack of tact was never more in evidence than when the Queen asked a Northwest London Army cadet nearly blinded in an IRA bombing how much he could see. “Not a lot,” Prince Philip interjected, pointing to the young man’s chest, “judging by that tie.” Similarly, when he met a group of children from the British Deaf Association who were standing near a Caribbean steel drum band, Philip declared, “If you’re near that music it’s no wonder you’re deaf.” The wheelchair-bound resident of a London nursing home scarcely knew how to react when Philip asked bluntly, “Do people trip over you?” (pgs 294 and 295)
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While the plot seemed far-fetched at first, Britons were shocked to learn in 2013 that both the Queen’s and Prince Charles’s powers were far from merely ceremonial, as had long been believed. In dozens of instances, both the monarch and her heir secretly threatened to withhold royal assent— a stamp of approval to legislation that was assumed to be automatically given— as a means of altering bills or vetoing them
altogether. Pointing out that the British people had always been led to believe these powers were “quaint and sweet,” legal scholar John Kirhope said it was clear that the Queen and her son wielded “real influence and
real power, albeit unaccountable.” (pg 2)
The Queen, who has a fondness for knee-length, floral-print Liberty of London nightgowns, puts on her favorite chenille robe and pads to the bathroom in bare feet. While she bathes, the maid lays out her wardrobe for the day— all preselected and tagged by her dresser and confidante Angela Kelly, who also chooses which one of the Queen’s two hundred purses will best go with her outfit. What is actually in the Queen’s
handbag, along with those magnets for picking up stray pins that might injure her corgis? Since she routinely powders her nose at the dinner table— a practice that some people find surprising— the Queen always carries a
treasured metal makeup case Philip made for her as a wedding gift. She also carries lipstick— in 1952 Elizabeth II commissioned her own shade called “the Balmoral Lipstick” to match her coronation robes— which she applies frequently throughout the day. In addition to a small selection of family snapshots and a number of good luck charms from her children— the Queen is unapologetically superstitious— Her Majesty’s handbag includes a small tube of mints, several crossword puzzles to while away the time spent traveling from one appearance to another, doggie treats, a fountain pen (she refuses to use a ballpoint), sunglasses, reading glasses, a small mirror, a diary and address book— and often a tiny camera she might suddenly whip out to take photos of other world leaders. To keep from having to place her purse on the floor, the Queen also carries a small white suction cup with a hook on it. When the occasion arises, she sticks the suction cup to the underside of a table and hangs her purse from it. “Very handy, don’t you think?” she said to one startled guest at a luncheon in Yorkshire. (pg 43)
Life with the Queen!
Neither the young princes nor the Queen, who saw no constitutional repercussions, seemed particularly rattled by stories of Diana’s extramarital exploits. Diana even kept William, whom she often referred to as a “deep thinker” and “my little wise old man,” up to date on some of the most intimate details of her love life. “Diana had both a mother-and-son relationship and a mother-and-husband relationship with William,” her friend Roberto Devorik said. Diana told Devorik she had “very private and very profound” conversations with William, and that he was “an extraordinary moral support.”
According to her friend Rosa Monckton, Diana told William “more things than most mothers would have told their children. But she had no choice. She wanted them to hear the truth... rather than read a distorted, exaggerated, and frequently untrue version in the tabloid press.”
Nevertheless, others who were close to the Princess wondered if it was appropriate for her to describe her feelings—sometimes in unsettlingly graphic terms— for men other than their father. In addition to seeking dating advice from her own young son, Diana talked to William about his father’s utterly passionate devotion to Camilla, the Palace’s continued efforts to silence her, and her “spiritual journey” that embraced everything from astrology, Tarot cards, and crystals to hypnotherapy, homeotherapy, aromatherapy, herbal medicine, reflexology, and feng shui.
As she stepped up her visits to pediatric cancer wards, AIDS patients, victims of domestic abuse, substance abusers, and the homeless, the Princess of Wales found herself leaning more heavily than ever on her son. “I pay attention to people, and I remember them,” she told William. “When I cup my hands around the face of someone suffering, they are comforting me as much as I am comforting them.”
Perhaps, but the strain on William was beginning to show. “Diana often cried on Prince William’s shoulder— literally and figuratively,” said one friend. “William’s role was really more alternative husband than son. It was
a heavy burden for anyone, but especially someone so young.”
For all the pressure she put on her son, the Princess nonetheless worried about William. She told her friend Richard Greene that the young Prince had “deep feelings and an understanding far beyond his years,” and that he was “an incredibly sensitive soul. He needs,” she added, “to be protected.”
Inevitably, Diana asked William if he approved of her marrying Dr. Khan, a Muslim. His succinct and oft-repeated reply: “Mummy, you have to do what makes you happy.”
The Queen did not share William’s opinion, however. Although Diana wanted to marry Khan and have two daughters by him, she also “knew that to marry a Muslim would create enormous problems for William and Harry,” Elsa Bowker said. Accordingly, she tried to keep the Khan affair under wraps— literally— by smuggling him into Kensington Palace in the trunk of her butler’s car. Nevertheless, the Palace soon got wind of it.
When she was informed that Diana was giving serious thought to marrying Khan, the Queen consulted with the Archbishop of Canterbury and her advisors about the possible ramifications. It was highly unlikely that the Church of England would recognize any such union, and even more unlikely that the Men in Gray would tolerate a Muslim’s becoming stepfather to Britain’s future king. “The Queen seldom shows her feelings,” said one Member of Parliament who was asked to weigh in, “but in this case it was clear that she felt the Princess of Wales had finally lost her mind completely.” Either that, he continued, or “Princess Diana was determined to bring down the monarchy.” Either way, the Queen, who once felt sympathy for her daughter-in-law, now viewed Diana as “the enemy.”
It was a sentiment that had been shared by most of the Queen’s relatives since the separation. Prince Philip refused to even acknowledge Diana’s presence at William’s eleventh birthday party. Princess Margaret, one of the few senior Royals who was genuinely fond of Diana and frequently spoke up in her defense at family gatherings, felt compelled to join the other Windsors in turning her back on the rebel Princess.
Now that Diana was intent on airing The Firm’s dirty linen in public and at the same time portraying the Royal Family as cold and unfeeling, Her Majesty was determined to retaliate. Knowing that it would deeply wound Diana, the Queen hastily added the names of Andrew Parker Bowles and his wife, Camilla, to the list of those fortunate few invited inside the royal enclosure at Ascot. (Even then, the Queen refused to be introduced to Camilla.) (pg 115 116 and 117)
A lot to unpack here, including the Queen's bigotry and Diana's emotional incest (or to use a better term, her parentification of her oldest child in particular).
FOR A BRIEF TIME, THE heat was off Charles after Princess in Love, Anna Pasternak’s book detailing James Hewitt’s affair with Diana, hit stores in September of 1994. In it, the former soldier and riding instructor shared the steamy details of his six-year affair with the Princess of Wales— leading Fleet Street to brand Hewitt “the Love Rat.”
Again worried about the impact on her sons, Diana later recalled that she “ran to them as fast as I could.” William, twelve, greeted her with a box of chocolates. “Mummy, I think you’ve been hurt,” he said. “These will
make you smile again.”
Charles was soon back in the line of fire. The release of Dimbleby’s Prince of Wales: A Biography in October 1994 sent more shock waves through Buckingham Palace. In it, he complained bitterly about his unhappy childhood, portraying Prince Philip as insensitive, callous, and overbearing, and his mother as cold, distant, and aloof.
The Queen and Philip were both wounded by the way Charles characterized them in the book. But nothing was so devastating to William and Harry as their father’s claim that he never loved their mother and only married her because Prince Philip forced him to do it.
“Imagine being told that your parents never loved each other,” Diana said. “How do you think poor Wills and Harry must feel?” When William asked if it was true, his eyes “pierced my heart like a dagger,” Diana said. “I just wanted to cry.” Later, at Highgrove, William confronted his father. “Why, Papa?” he wanted to know. “Why did you do it?” Before Charles could answer, Wills bolted from the room. (pg 118 and 119)
Turns out writing explosive books runs in the family.
On April 25, 1994, Charles attended a Streisand concert at Wembley Arena in London, and she sang “Someday My Prince Will Come” in his honor. Just six months later Barbra, fresh off a string of high-profile love affairs, was among the scores of A-List Hollywood stars who showed up for a gala honoring the Prince of Wales on November 2, 1994. Not long after the gala, Streisand had a secret rendezvous with Charles at his suite in the secluded Bel-Air Hotel. When word of the meeting got out, the official explanation was that Barbra Streisand and Prince Charles enjoyed “a private tea.” Harold Brooks-Baker noted that Charles had had “private teas” with “a long procession of women over the years. From what I understand, he was absolutely besotted with Barbra Streisand. Did anyone ever turn Charles down? Not to my knowledge.”
The Prince and the Superstar would hook up again ten months later, this time after Streisand flew to London to attend a dinner for Charles’s favorite preservationist organization, the Foundation for Architecture. Fresh off a scorching affair with Angelina Jolie’s father, Academy Award–winning actor Jon Voight, Barbra somehow managed to remain under the radar in England. When Elton John arrived at Highgrove for a private dinner, he was “surprised” to find Streisand there—and neither Diana nor Camilla anywhere in sight.
“The Prince and Miss Streisand were very affectionate toward each other,” a Highgrove staff member recalled. Another housekeeper described Charles and Barbra as acting “quite flustered” when she surprised them in Charles’s study.
According to Lady Elsa Bowker, Diana “knew that Charles was infatuated with Miss Streisand. She would not have been surprised if they had an affair.” As for Camilla: “She would have been absolutely thrilled— that would have excited her, I think.” (pgs 120 and 121)
So Charles probably had an affair with Barbra Streisand.
DURING THIS WHIRLWIND VISIT TO the United States, Diana had one particular reason to be pleased. The Princess and her friend the Duchess of York had often openly fantasized about marrying John F. Kennedy, Jr. For Diana, the connection ran deeper. She had always admired Jackie, and would later say that she hoped William might turn out as well as John when it came to handling the pressures of public life. When Jackie died of lymphoma in May of 1994, Diana wrote condolence letters to both Caroline and John, telling them that their mother had been her role model.
Diana and Kennedy finally arranged to meet at her suite in the Carlyle Hotel on Madison Avenue, ostensibly to talk about the possibility of doing an interview for John’s magazine George. For years, the Carlyle had served
as JFK’s base of operations in New York; Jackie and her children lived at the hotel during their postassassination transition from Washington to an apartment on Fifth Avenue, and John still spent weekends there when he wanted to escape from the pressures of being People magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive.”
After Diana entered the Carlyle through its main entrance on East Seventy-sixth Street, John entered undetected through an unmarked side door on East Seventy-seventh —one of the many ways in and out of the hotel President Kennedy had used to elude the press. Diana’s private secretary, Patrick Jephson, later described the meeting between these two iconic figures as “brief and businesslike.” Conversely, Diana’s spiritual advisor, Simone Simmons, insisted the Princess told her flatly that she and JFK Jr. “ended up in bed,” that their encounter was “pure lust” and “pure chemistry,” and that Kennedy was “an amazing lover—a ten, the tops.”
Diana’s butler, Paul Burrell, insisted that she and JFK Jr. were never lovers. At the time Kennedy, who had already had affairs with the high-profile likes of Madonna, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Daryl Hannah, was involved with Calvin Klein public relations executive Carolyn Bessette. Although Kennedy went on to marry Bessette, neither seemed particularly interested in being faithful to the other. For his part, Kennedy was coy about his interaction with the Princess of Wales. “Diana had the most unusual upwards glance, really seductive,” John told his friend William Noonan. “The most unusual blue eyes...” A one-night stand with the Princess was “certainly not out of the question,” another friend said. “Sometimes he talked a blue streak about the women he slept with— all the lurid details— but with certain women, he could be very closed-mouthed. He had lots of secrets.” (pgs 129 and 130)
I don't know if I believe JFK Jr and Diana were an item. It's a bit too perfect.
While the Windsors enjoyed their country pursuits in Scotland, five hundred miles to the south a psychic named Edward Williams walked into the South Wales police station at 2:12 in the afternoon and told police he had a premonition that Princess Diana was going to die. He had previously predicted— correctly— that Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II would be victims of failed assassination attempts. The log of the department’s
Special Branch investigative unit recounted Williams’s August 27, 1997, visit in detail, and described him as appearing to be “quite normal.” Williams realized he could have been dismissed as the “local nutter,” but
felt he had to “do something... the feeling that Diana was in danger didn’t leave me.” (pgs 146 and 147)
Spooky!
Things were considerably more promising on her dad’s side of the family. The Middletons were related to Academy Award–winning actor Sir John Gielgud; author and illustrator Beatrix Potter; Britain’s leading Shakespearean actress, Ellen Terry; and— through seventeenth-century statesman Sir Thomas Fairfax— even to the Royal Family. (Known as “Black Tom” because of his swarthy complexion, Fairfax played a key role in the restoration of the monarchy and the return of Charles II to the throne in 1660.) Kate and William were, it turned out, fifteenth cousins. (pg 153 and 154)
This family really likes marrying family.
Meantime, the family income soared. Where Carole’s parents could never have afforded to send her to a private school, the Middletons effortlessly paid the $20,000 a year it took to send seven-year-old Catherine to St. Andrew’s School in the nearby town of Pangbourne. Catherine excelled at both sports and academics, and— not surprisingly given her established fondness for playing dress-up— sang the lead in the school’s musical productions.
During one of those performances, captured on video, Catherine plays the lead in the Victorian melodrama Murder in the Barn. In one eerily prophetic scene, a fortune-teller informs Catherine’s character that she will marry a rich, handsome stranger.
“Will he take me away from here?” she asks.
“Yes,” replies the fortune-teller, “to London.”
Eventually, the hero of the play asks her to marry him. “Yes, it’s all I’ve ever longed for,” Catherine gushes. “Yes, oh, yes, dear William.” (pg 157)
Aha! Scheming woman even as a child! (I'm sure he's just noting it for general interest reasons. Pretty sure, anyway.)
CHARLES INSTINCTIVELY KNEW HOW DEEPLY Diana’s death would be felt by the British people, and that the Royal Family must acknowledge the loss if it had any hope of surviving. But the Queen had other things on her mind. Her first call to the British Embassy in Paris was not to seek details about Diana’s injuries or the crash itself, but to ask if the major pieces of state jewelry Diana sometimes traveled with— tiaras, bracelets, rings, or necklaces that actually belonged to the crown —were anywhere in evidence.
Beatrice Humbert, chief nurse at Paris’s Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, was standing by the bed where Diana’s body lay naked beneath a plain white sheet when the British Consul General burst into the room. “The Queen! The Queen,” he said. “Madame, the Queen is worried about the jewelry.We must find the jewelry, quickly. The Queen wants to know, ‘Where are the jewels?!'"
"There isn’t any jewelry,” replied Humbert, who was taken aback by the question. “No wedding band, of course. No rings, no necklace.” (The Queen had an encyclopedic knowledge of the jewels in the royal collection
and guarded them jealously. Once, when told that the avant-garde artist Damien Hirst was using diamonds to make a jeweled skull, she smiled. “I prefer diamonds,” the Queen said, “around my neck.”) (pg 159)
In case you couldn't tell, the Queen doesn't come off well in this book.
While Charles, Blair, Lord Airlie, and others grappled with the question of how best to pay tribute to Diana, the Queen and Prince Philip remained at Balmoral with their devastated grandsons. The night Diana died, William and Harry were not awakened to be told the news; the Queen felt that nothing would be gained by robbing them of these last few precious hours of sleep before their world collapsed around them. To spare them any further upset after they were told, she ordered a news blackout at Balmoral. No newspapers were to be brought inside the castle, and all television sets and radios were turned off.
Had the televisions at Balmoral been on, William and Harry would have seen one world leader after another expressing shock and sympathy. “A beacon of light has been extinguished,” declared former British Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher. French President Jacques Chirac described Diana as “a woman of our times, warm, full of life and generosity. Her tragic death will be deeply felt.” Vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard, a solemn President Bill Clinton praised her for embracing AIDS patients and working to “end the scourge of land mines in the world.”
Standing outside the church he attended in his parliamentary district, Tony Blair struggled to maintain his composure as he talked to reporters. “I feel like everyone else in this country today, utterly devastated...Our
thoughts and prayers are with Princess Diana’s family and in particular her two sons, the two boys. Our hearts go out to them. We are today a nation in a state of shock and in grief that is so deeply painful for us...Princess
Diana was the people’s Princess, and that’s how she will remain, in our hearts and in our memories forever.”
The Palace, however, felt a simple, fifteen-word statement would suffice: “The Queen and Prince of Wales are deeply shocked and distressed by this terrible news.”
The Queen also saw no reason to disrupt the Windsors’ summer routine at Balmoral. Just a few hours after learning their mother had been killed, the boys joined other members of the Royal Family at Crathie Church, just across the River Dee from the castle grounds. Asked earlier that morning if she wanted any change in the service to reflect what had happened, the Queen made it abundantly clear that she did not. Elizabeth was also asked if— just this once— Diana’s name might be included in the morning prayer for the Royal Family. Again, Her Majesty felt that, since Diana had been stripped of her royal status, there was no need. The entire service, then, was conducted without any mention of Diana being made. Confused, Harry turned to his father at one point and asked, “Are you
sure Mummy is dead?”
Some 550 miles away in London, grief-stricken Britons demanded to know why the flag over Buckingham Palace was not flying at half-mast when every other flag in the United Kingdom was. In keeping with royal protocol, the flag flew only when the monarch was in residence— and never at half-mast. The Queen, as with all matters, did not feel Diana’s death rose to the level of requiring any break in precedent.
If the flag over Buckingham Palace flew only when the Queen was in residence, then why wasn’t she there? And why, when tributes were pouring in from all over the world, had not only the Queen but the entire Royal Family remained totally silent on the subject of Diana’s death?
LET THE FLAG FLY AT HALF MAST, insisted the Daily Mail. The Mirror pleaded SPEAK TO US MA’AM— YOUR PEOPLE ARE SUFFERING. WHERE IS OUR QUEEN? The Sun asked, WHERE IS HER FLAG? Polls now showed that 66 percent of all Britons were convinced Diana’s death signaled the end of Britain’s monarchy.
“A stunning reversal has taken place,” observed constitutional expert Anthony Barrett. “The monarchy must bow its head, or it will be broken. We, the people, will henceforth define how they should represent us...It’s as if the country is crying, ‘Diana is dead! Long live democracy!’” Agreed Harold Brooks-Baker of Burke’s Peerage: “They have blood on their hands... Here was a victim of the monarchy. Diana died a martyr. We can only hope her death brings about another kind of palace rebellion. The House of Windsor is in desperate need of a major overhaul, and if it doesn’t get one soon, I fear for the very existence of the monarchy in Britain.”
Tony Blair, caught in “that storm, unpredictable and unnerving,” also saw a revolution in the making. “The outpouring of grief was turning into a mass movement for change,” he recalled. “It was a moment of supreme
national articulation and it was menacing for the royal family... Public anger was turning towards the Queen.”
It was left to Charles, who had the full backing of the Prime Minister, to stand up to his mother. Grudgingly, she agreed to a public funeral that would turn out to be quite unlike any the world had ever seen. Charles also urged the Queen to return to London immediately, fly the flag over Buckingham Palace at half-staff, and address her people. Either that, or the Prince of Wales would take to the airwaves himself to apologize to the nation on behalf of the Royal Family.
The Queen, finally beginning to grasp the gravity of the situation, yielded on all points. The next day, she departed for London. As soon as she arrived at Buckingham Palace, the royal standard went up— and when
it stopped halfway up the flagpole, the massive crowd that had gathered at the palace gates began to cheer. (pgs 164, 165, 166, 167)
How badly the Queen botched Diana's death continues to marvel as at the time of this writing, the final season of The Crown is dropping.
At St. James’s Palace, Charles prepared for the possibility that he might be shot down in the streets the next day. He had already done all he could to protect Camilla, ordering that the usual security detail guarding her at Ray Mill House be beefed up with an additional four Royal Protection officers. The “Close Protection Team,” as Prince Charles’s security detail was sometimes called, usually consisted of four plainclothes bodyguards armed with Glock 9-mm pistols. It was doubled to eight.
That night before Diana’s funeral, facing the prospect of his own imminent assassination, Charles sat down in his study and scribbled four brief letters in his distinctive, spidery script— to William, to Harry, to Camilla, and to the people of Great Britain. Each, according to an intimate friend with whom he shared the letters’ contents, was signed, then placed in a small red envelope bearing the three-plumed seal of the Prince of Wales.
In his note to William, Charles lauded his elder son for his maturity and predicted he would make a great king. He praised Harry for supporting his brother, but at the same time urged him to live his own life and not be overshadowed by William. He told Camilla that she was the only woman he had ever loved, and that, had he lived, he would have fulfilled his promise to make her queen. Writing to his countrymen, Charles noted that, despite making some serious mistakes, he had done his best as Prince of Wales. Charles was now sorry that he would not have the chance to serve his country as its king. The four red envelopes were left on Prince Charles’s desk with instructions to deliver them only “in the event of my death.” (pgs 168 and 169)
...Damn.
What no one knew at the time was that, from the beginning, Diana’s brother opposed putting fifteen-year-old William and Harry, twelve, through such punishing stress. Spencer later claimed that the Palace’s string-pulling Men in Gray had orchestrated the grim procession from Kensington Palace to Westminster Abbey, and then “tricked” him into believing that the boys had asked to walk behind their mother’s coffin. “I genuinely felt that Diana would not have wanted them to have done it,” Spencer said. But by the time he learned the truth, it was too late. (pgs 169 and 170)
Charles installed his young, traumatized sons as human shields for public relations at best, literal violence at worst. Yikes.
The most historically significant moment during the procession occurred just as Diana’s coffin passed in front of Buckingham Palace. Queen Elizabeth, standing outside with her family, bowed her head— a seemingly spontaneous tribute to the young woman who had breathed new life into the monarchy while at the same time pushing it to the brink of extinction.
Of course, there was nothing spontaneous about the Queen’s bow. It was a gesture that had been discussed with Charles, Philip, and the Queen’s cadre of advisors now pushing for some dramatic gesture on Her Majesty’s part— a sign that she truly cared. Elizabeth II was moved to consider bowing to Diana’s coffin only after Charles bluntly cautioned her that, despite whatever concessions she had already made, the Queen might be jeered at the funeral. Scotland Yard, monitoring a flood of threats against the Crown, now feared the Queen might even be attacked.
For Earl Spencer, Her Majesty’s history-making bow in tribute to Diana was all too little, too late. He was especially outraged by the Palace’s duplicity in forcing William and Harry to walk behind their mother’s coffin— a scheme in which he was an unwitting accomplice. It was this final act of deception, Spencer later said, that led him to deliver a scathing attack on the Royal Family during his history-making eulogy inside the Abbey.
It would have been impossible to find a more appropriate setting for Diana’s final, official exit from the Game of Crowns. The tombs of some of history’s most formidable queens— “Bloody Mary” Tudor, Elizabeth I, and Mary, Queen of Scots— were all located in the thousand-year-old Abbey, the site of every coronation since William the Conqueror in 1066.
The Queen sat, expressionless, among two thousand mourners inside the Abbey while Elton John sang “Candle in the Wind 1997,” a moving tribute to his old friend that would become the number-one best-selling single of all time. Even at this late date, the Palace objected to inviting a rock star— albeit a rock star who would be knighted the following year— to perform at such a solemn occasion.
With the sovereign and the rest of the Royals seated just a few yards away, Earl Spencer praised Diana as “someone with a natural nobility who proved in that last year that she needed no royal title to continue to generate her particular brand of magic.” In the name of Diana’s “blood family,” Spencer then pledged to his sister that he “would not allow” William and Harry to “suffer the anguish that used regularly to drive you to tearful despair.” He added that the Spencers would “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.”
Prince Charles, who despite his own efforts to pay proper tribute to Diana could still become enraged by such impudence, pounded his knee with his fist. The Queen Mother looked aghast, and First Lady Hillary Clinton, seated not far from the Royal Family, gasped at Spencer’s unexpectedly frank remarks. The Queen, an expert at concealing her emotions, continued to sit sphinxlike, Queen Victoria’s hundred-carat diamond bow brooch glistening on the left shoulder of her black wool suit.
There was little doubt where public sentiment still stood at that moment. The tens of thousands of people who watched the service on jumbo television screens outside the Abbey reacted to Earl Spencer’s attack on the Royal Family with thunderous applause. The reaction was similar inside, and while William and Harry joined in the applause, the Queen and Queen Mother, Prince Philip, Charles, and the rest of the Royal Family managed to maintain their customary air of benign indifference.(pgs 170, 171, and 172)
Fleet Street also did its part to help the princes get over their mother’s death. In the immediate aftermath of the crash, paparazzi were blamed for literally hounding Diana to death— until it was determined that Dodi’s driver, who was killed along with Dodi and Diana, was drunk and under the influence of painkillers. Hewing to guidelines imposed by Britain’s watchdog Press Complaints Commission, press photographers agreed to keep a respectful distance from the boys, and not photograph them in private situations until they turned eighteen.
The Men in Gray, no longer burdened by the Princess of Wales’s inconvenient notions of humanizing the monarchy, also took steps to eradicate whatever remained of Diana’s influence in her sons’ lives. Overnight, family and friends, some of whom had known the boys all their lives, were barred from seeing or speaking with William and Harry. Diana’s longtime friend Roberto Devorik tried repeatedly and without success to contact the boys, as did Lady Elsa Bowker, Annabel Goldsmith, Rosa Monckton, and many others. Always the answer was the same: Prince William and Prince Harry were simply “unavailable.”
Regardless of Earl Spencer’s vow that the young princes’ “blood family” would continue to guide them as Diana had done, the Queen and Prince Charles were determined to Windsorize William and Harry. “Blood family?” the Queen had indignantly asked her private secretary. “Are we not ‘blood family’ as well?”
At Eton, Housemaster Andrew Gailey and his wife, Shauna, made certain that William and Harry were completely insulated from any outside influences— and that there would be no calls or visitors not vetted by the Palace. Weekends and holidays were usually devoted to the traditional pursuits of Britain’s upper classes: shooting, polo, and foxhunting. (pgs 172 and 173)
Paparazzi were definitely to blame in part, although not as much as the impaired driver, as well as the medical procedures in France at the time.
Now determined to take risks and be noticed, she even started flashing her naked derriere at boys from her second-story dormitory window. Unfortunately, her passion for mooning became something of an obsession; over the course of the year she exposed her nude posterior to exceedingly grateful male students no fewer than ninety times. “She kind of got addicted to it,” said her schoolmate and close friend, Jessica Hay.
Soon, she was known across the campus as “Kate Middlebum”—a moniker that, according to her friends, Kate took considerable pride in. (pg 178)
That is definitely something you didn't know about Kate Middleton.
Operation PB [Charles's attempt to garner public support for his relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles] continued apace into the spring [of 1999], with Camilla returning to the London Ritz that May to host a dinner for the National Osteoporosis Society. This time she was intent on flaunting her status as the future monarch’s official mistress; on her right collar glittered a diamond brooch bearing the Prince of Wales’s distinctive emblem of three plumed feathers. Later, when she and Charles made what was only their third public appearance together, Camilla wore a spectacular $200,000 necklace that had been a favorite of Diana’s. “It’s simply heartbreaking,” said the late Princess’s friend Vivienne Parry, “to see someone else wearing Diana’s things.” (pg 179)
Yikes.
Her Majesty knew all too well that, whatever other psychological problems Diana may have had, the Princess of Wales was not being irrational when she complained of being spied on by the government.
Diana “was not being paranoid at all,” said her longtime Royal Protection officer, Ken Wharfe. “Her every move was being watched,” Wharfe said. “They routinely taped the Princess’s telephone calls. Princess Diana was under constant surveillance.”
As it turned out, every member of the Royal Family was being spied on by Britain’s intelligence agencies. “Their personal conversations, both on the phone and sometimes person to person, are monitored and recorded,” said Glynn Jones, one of the British military surveillance experts placed in charge of spying on Diana. In addition, “many of their movements are captured on videotape. It’s impossible for them to keep any secrets. The most personal things are recorded. Charles, Camilla, and William are always under surveillance by secret service personnel.” (pg 192)
That wouldn't be good for anyone's mental health.
Elizabeth was at Balmoral reviewing some of the security precautions being taken for William at St. Andrews when her new private secretary, Robin Janvrin, called with news that Islamic terrorists had carried out the 9/11 attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington. After watching the collapse of the Twin Towers on television, she sat down at her desk and wrote to President George W. Bush that she
was following events with “growing disbelief and total shock.”
This time, the Queen did not hesitate to order that the Union Jack at Buckingham Palace and all royal residences be lowered to half-staff. She also wanted American music and the American national anthem to be added to the repertoire during the daily Changing of the Guard ceremonies in front of Buckingham Palace. (Compounding the sadness for the Queen that day was the sudden death of her racing manager and best friend since childhood, Lord Carnarvon.)
Three days later, the Queen, Prince Philip, Prince Charles, and other members of the Royal Family joined twenty-seven hundred people in St.Paul’s Cathedral for a memorial service honoring the victims. After the crowd delivered a stirring rendition of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Her Majesty stood up to sing every word of “The Star-Spangled Banner”— loudly. It was the first time an English monarch, who never joins in on her own anthem (“God save ...me?” she had tried to explain early in her reign to one of her sister’s American friends), ever sang the national anthem of the United States.
It was an important show of sympathy and support for Britain’s American cousins. From this point on, Tony Blair briefed the Queen on all the important details of the war on terror leading up to the invasion of Afghanistan by the United States, Britain, and their NATO allies. Blair also leaned heavily on the monarch for advice. “Obviously, there was a huge focus on the Arab world,” he recalled, “and that is something she has immense experience of.” After all, he continued, the Queen “knew the royal families over a long, long period of time— she has a lot of real insight into how they work, how they operate, how they think.”
There were other ramifications for the Royal Family. Additional security precautions were initiated following the 9/11 attacks, including the construction of “panic rooms” at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle. In the event of an attack, the Queen and other senior Royals on the premises would be rushed to one of these chambers. Once inside, they would presumably be safe behind eighteen-inch-thick, flame-resistant steel walls designed to withstand a protracted artillery bombardment or a direct hit by a light aircraft. (pgs 195, 196, and 197)
In which Elizabeth overcompensates for 9/11 because of Diana's death.
Both “sporty” types, Kate and William cycled up and down the beach on weekends and swam laps together almost daily at the Old Course Hotel pool. If the Prince missed a class (she never did), Kate shared her notes with him. There was also the occasional drink at the West Port Bar or Broons, or even a late-night karaoke session at Ma Bells, a loud, knotty pine–paneled student hangout in the lobby of the St. Andrews Golf Hotel.
None of this had been enough, however, to keep both William and Kate from wondering if St. Andrews was the right place for them. During the Christmas break months earlier, they both announced to their respective families that they felt overworked and isolated— and that they wanted to transfer to Edinburgh immediately.
Mark Bolland considered this to be “nothing more than a wobble— a touch of homesickness, entirely normal.” But Prince Charles and the Queen both knew the situation was far from normal. It would not do for William to appear pampered and weak by leaving after a single semester. “He would have been seen as a quitter,” a royal aide told journalist Robert Jobson, “and it would have been an even bigger disaster for the monarchy.”
A deal was quickly hammered out with St. Andrews. Acknowledging that it would also have been a public relations catastrophe for St. Andrews if William left after only one semester, Rector Andrew Neil added that the
administration “worked very hard to keep him.” William received counseling and switched his major from art history to geography. “I don’t think I was homesick,” William later conceded. “I was more daunted.” Neil understood completely: “He got the blues, which happens.” Charles sweetened the arrangement by rewarding his son with a $32,000 gold-inlaid hunting rifle. (pgs 199 and 200)
As you do.
BUCKINGHAM PALACE
JANUARY 2005
The royal jeweler opened the red velvet box, and the Queen peered eagerly inside. He pointed to the Plasticine bag containing a small chunk of twenty-one-carat gold. This was all that remained of the Welsh nugget that had been used to make the rings of royal brides starting with the Queen Mother’s ring in 1923— Elizabeth’s in 1947, Princess Margaret’s in 1960, Princess Anne’s in 1973, and Diana’s in 1981. This was the nugget, taken from the Clogau St. David’s mine at Bontddu in North Wales, that Her Majesty reserved only for those she deemed worthy: members of her immediate family, or— as was the case of Elizabeth and Diana, Princess of Wales— future queens. She put on her reading glasses and took a closer look. “Oh, dear,” sighed the Queen as she shook her head. “There is very
little of it left.”
With a white-gloved hand, the royal jeweler then pointed to another bag containing a larger nugget, this one made from gold taken from the River Mawdach as well as St. David’s mine. Gold from this nugget was used in 1986 to make the wedding ring for the problematic and much-resented Sarah, Duchess of York. It seemed only fitting to the Queen that this bit of Welsh gold, and not the nugget that held such significance for the Windsors, be used for Camilla’s wedding ring. “This,” she told the royal jeweler, “will do.”
Over the past few years, the Queen had come to regard as inevitable the marriage of her eldest son to his longtime mistress. Elizabeth had kept her promise to the Queen Mother not to permit it, but there had been mounting pressure from Charles and his St. James’s team to make the Prince’s relationship with Camilla official. (pgs 205 and 206)
Worth noting that Elizabeth approved a chunk of the gold for Harry's wife's ring.
However reticent the Queen may have been to give royal consent to her son’s remarriage, it was a welcome change from having to deal with Harry’s latest headline-making gaffe. This time, the hapless Prince attended a costume party wearing the khaki uniform of desert tank commander Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps, complete with a swastika arm band.
The next day’s Sun ran a full-page shot of Harry whooping it up in costume with the headline HARRY THE NAZI, igniting a firestorm of protest from members of Parliament, World War II veterans, the Israeli foreign minister, and the families of Holocaust survivors. Lord Levy, Britain’s special envoy to the Middle East, called Harry “clueless about the reality of what happened in the Holocaust” and branded his behavior “appalling.”By wearing a swastika, Lord Levy continued, the young prince had “sent shock waves through the international community.”
Mortified that he had once again brought shame to the Royal Family, Harry, who was about to enter Britain’s elite Sandhurst military academy, conceded his ignorance: The third in line to the throne had no idea what the swastika signified, or why it might be deemed monumentally offensive. Branding Harry “a complete thicko,” and a “stupid young man who meant no harm,” British commentator Tom Utley went on to ask, “What the hell did they teach him during his five years at Eton?”
Charles was, in the words of one friend, “apoplectic” about what Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center denounced as Harry’s “shameful act.” Clarence House immediately issued an apology on Prince Harry’s behalf. That was not sufficient for Conservative Party leader Michael Howard, who joined the growing chorus demanding that Prince Harry appear on television to deliver a personal apology. Prince Harry, Howard said, should “tell us himself just how contrite he is.” Charles, convinced that his younger son was now being unfairly pilloried for an innocent if spectacularly stupid mistake, refused. Camilla agreed. “The poor boy,” she said, “has been through quite enough. He made a mistake, he’s said he’s sorry. What is all the fuss about?”
Throughout Harry’s Nazi ordeal, Buckingham Palace remained curiously silent. Of all senior Royals, the Queen was perhaps least judgmental. “He’s young,” she told Charles. “He didn’t live through it like I did.” The Queen would have her own explaining to do a full decade later, when photographs surfaced showing Elizabeth doing a Nazi salute as a young girl six years before the start of World War II. Joining in, enthusiastically, are the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret. At the time, the Queen’s Nazi-sympathizing uncle Edward VIII, who would eventually give up the throne to marry Wallis Simpson, was actually at Balmoral teaching the entire Royal Family the proper way to Sieg Heil. “Both Queen Elizabeths, mother and daughter, have commanded such affection and respect for so long,” observed British writer Max Hastings, “it is painful to see their images tarnished.” (pgs 210 and 211)
In his memoir, Harry credits William and Kate for suggesting the costume.
At no time did Charles and Camilla kiss— not when the well-wishers were begging them to outside the chapel, and not now as they left the reception. Camilla’s new stepsons, however, were not so shy. By way of making it abundantly clear that they approved of the woman who destroyed their parents’ marriage, William and Harry each kissed Camilla on both cheeks— the first time they had done so publicly. (pg 214)
Again, according to his book, Harry claims he and William had begged their father not to marry Camilla.
Unfortunately, at his Out of Africa–themed twenty-first birthday party at Windsor Castle, it seemed that William had turned his attention away from Kate and toward an old flame. The $800,000 bash, which featured elephant rides and monkeys swinging overhead on vines, was most memorable for the guests who showed up in costume. William and Kate wore Tarzan-and-Jane costumes— a loincloth for him, a skimpy animal-print dress for her— while Charles donned a dashiki, Camilla wore a multicolored caftan with a red-feathered headdress, and Elizabeth, as the Queen of Swaziland, opted for a white headdress, a white shift dress gown, and a white fur cape. (pg 219)
That is just painful all around.
Just ten days later, William swept Kate and a dozen of their closest friend off to his favorite place on the planet— the foothills of Mount Kenya. But no sooner did they return than Kate was once again darting down streets with packs of paparazzi in hot pursuit.
Kate had no official standing and therefore was not technically entitled to government protection of any sort. But when a German magazine published a photograph pinpointing Kate’s Chelsea flat with a big red arrow, William asked the Palace to do something about it. Prince Charles was happy to oblige. At his personal request, the Queen’s law firm of Harbottle & Lewis fired off letters to newspaper and magazine publishers threatening legal action if they didn’t back off.
This time, however, the Palace’s threats fell on deaf ears. “Kate Middleton wants the privacy of a nun,” said the Sun’s Fergus Shanahan, “yet she chooses to go out with Prince William. She can’t have it both ways.” (pgs 232 and 233)
Worth noting the actions of the Family regarding the press when it comes to Kate than when it came to Megan Markle.
After a stop at Ground Zero and a celebrity-crammed champagne reception at the Museum of Modern Art, the couple awoke the next morning to a front-page photo of Camilla wearing an ill-fitting blue velvet dress and the headline QUEEN CAMILLA IS NEW YORK’S FRUMP TOWER. “If it was Diana they were looking for, forget it,” New York columnist Cindy Adams remarked. “Glamorous Camilla definitely ain’t.” (pg 233)
"Frump Tower" made me laugh.
The next morning, Her Majesty saw the front-page photos of William’s girlfriend leaving after a hard day on the job—precisely as Kate had intended. Just a few days later, those same tabloids were filled with pictures of Kate at Sandringham, carrying several bloody game birds that had just been shot by the Heir. Around her neck were the binoculars William had given her the previous year for Christmas. “How sad,” observed the legendary French movie bombshell-turned-animal-rights-advocate Brigitte Bardot. “She was trying to win William and his family. But this is not the way to get a man. And I do know one or two things about it, you know.”
Bardot’s remarks only pushed the Queen more squarely into Kate’s corner. Elizabeth had come in for plenty of criticism from animal rights activists before, especially after she was caught on video clubbing a pheasant to death with her walking stick after it was brought to her, still thrashing, by one of Philip’s hunting dogs. Her Majesty, a Palace spokesman explained at the time, was only acting quickly to put the bird out of its misery—something she was rather expert at, since she’d been required to beat not-quite-dead animals to death several times before.
“Miss Bardot,” the Queen told her former private secretary, “is a silly woman who has absolutely no idea what she’s talking about. She wasn’t a terribly good actress either, as I recall.” (pg 244)
Ripping Bardot for her acting over animal welfare isn't as good as ripping Bardot for her racism.
Charles went on to tell his son that it was cruel to keep stringing Kate along. It was, said the man who had essentially kept the love of his life waiting for forty years, “better that you break it off now.”
Before counseling William, Charles had, of course, asked Camilla for her opinion. The Duchess of Cornwall had always liked and even admired Kate, but that was not the issue. Camilla still harbored misgivings about Kate’s working-class roots, and believed that the best match for William was to be found among the daughters of their aristocratic friends. She was also “disgusted with William and Kate sucking up all the attention,” a former Clarence House staffer said. “Camilla knew the Prince of Wales suffered this as much as she did. Charles and Camilla needed the love of the people and they figured there is only so much love to go around.”
At first, Charles was reluctant to tell William to break it off with Kate. After all, among the senior Royals, the Prince of Wales had always been Kate’s biggest booster. But Camilla argued convincingly that, out of deference to Kate, this was the wisest course. (pgs 248 and 249)
Oh, Camilla, you schemer!
The ceremony itself was flawless, right down to the bride’s wedding band made of Welsh gold— the final precious fragment from the original Clogau St. David’s mine nugget that the Queen had denied to Camilla but happily reserved for Kate. (Unlike his father, William decided not to wear a wedding ring. (pg 252)
Not final, apparently. Interesting about William skipping the ring.
For three years, Camilla and the Men in Gray— most of whom still doubted that commoner Kate was a suitable mate for a future king— had been hearing stories about Kate’s wild Uncle Gary Goldsmith, the tattooed, profanity-spewing, cocaine-loving tech industry mogul who hosted William and Kate at “Le Maison de Bang Bang,” his crudely named estate on Ibiza. Camilla relayed the stories to Charles, but once again, the Prince of Wales had no stomach for blowing the whistle on the Middletons.
It was not until July 2009 that security officials who were concerned about William’s safety leaked the information to News of the World, which promptly launched an undercover sting operation of its own. The headlines were scathing: KATE MIDDLETON DRUG AND VICE SHOCK: TYCOON WHO BOASTS OF HOSTING WILLS VILLA HOLIDAY SUPPLIES COCAINE AND FIXES HOOKERS. Worst of all, Goldsmith boasted about his royal connections to the undercover tabloid reporters, saying that he planned to give the bride away at Kate’s wedding to William, that he was looking forward to being
the “Queen’s uncle,” and that he planned to be made a duke and have his own suite at Buckingham Palace, called “The Goldsmith Wing.”
Whether it was someone in Camilla’s camp or the Men in Gray who urged security officials to leak the story to the News of the World, the obvious intention was to derail William and Kate’s relationship. Yet the Queen,
rather than turning her back on Kate, expressed sympathy for a young woman who found herself perpetually in the crosshairs of the tabloid press. “We all have relatives,” she muttered to an equerry as she perused her newspapers, “that we’d sometimes rather not think about.” (pgs 259 and 260)
Once again, interesting which family they distance and which they take seriously (Megan Markle's grifter father).
The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were in the middle of a nine-day “Jubilee Tour” of Southeast Asia and the Pacific when topless images of the Duchess were published in French and Italian magazines.
The photos, taken when William and Kate were sunbathing while on holiday at a private villa in Provence, were snapped from a distance of more than five hundred yards by a paparazzo using a telephoto lens. Kate burst into tears when she saw the less-than-flattering pictures. Furious, William immediately ordered royal lawyers to obtain an injunction against the French magazine Closer, which ran the images, and to lodge a criminal invasion-of-privacy complaint with French authorities. The photographer who took the photos and the editor who decided to publish them were charged, but three years later the criminal case was still wending its way through France’s notoriously slow court system. (pg 275)
"Less-than-flattering"? Seriously? Not the fact they were nude photos, taken without her permission, arguably a form a sexual assault?
William and Kate sent their condolences from Australia, where their squealing son was still charming the folks Down Under just the way his father had. But George represented something even more—something Great Britain and the Commonwealth had never seen. According to Time magazine’s Andrew Ferguson, George embodied “almost American-style upward mobility, with a British twist: if you work hard and play by the
rules, regardless of race, color or creed, you too can marry your daughter off to become the mother of a King... The future King of England and Defender of the Faith has emerged from a mother who is without a drop of peerage blood. My guess is the boy, quite apart from his personal qualities, will prove an inconvenience to antiroyalists and monarchists alike.” (pg 285)
...Huh.
Prince George’s arrival marked only the second time in history that three generations of direct royal heirs were alive while there was a reigning monarch on the throne. The last time this occurred was during the reign of Queen Victoria, when Edward VII, George V, and brothers Edward VIII and George VI were all waiting in line to wear the crown.
Charles was still waiting. At sixty-seven, he was already three years older than the oldest person ever to assume the throne— William IV, who succeeded George IV in 1830. On September 9, 2015, the Queen surpassed Victoria’s reign of 63 years, 216 days, becoming the longest-reigning British monarch in history. The distinction, she said with a sly smile, was “not one to which I have ever aspired.”
Yet there was a good chance she would reign longer still. Much, much longer. Her mother lived to be 101, and she was active and alert almost to the very last day of her life. At ninety, the Queen could live another decade or more. Were she to live as long as the Queen Mother, Charles would become king at seventy-eight, and Camilla his Queen at seventy-nine. If Charles, in turn, lived to be as old as Prince Philip, William and Kate would both be well past sixty by the time William assumed the throne. (pgs 289 and 290)
Just interesting. Charles obviously became King before age seventy-eight, but not much before.
Nothing so rattled the British monarch, however, as the events in Rome. “No, no,” were the Queen’s words when she was told that Pope Benedict XVI, who was one year younger than Elizabeth, had abdicated. “It cannot be! I don’t understand.” Neither did the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics. After all, there hadn’t been a papal abdication in six hundred years. (pgs 291 and 292)
To be fair, that abdication was brought about due to child sex abuse scandals rocking the institution. Ask (wait for it) Prince Andrew.
“Does [Charles] want the job [of monarch]? Yes, of course he wants it. It’s what he’s been training for all his life,” a former advisor said. “Does it bother him that his mother has to die for him to get it? Of course, but she doesn’t have to die for that to happen, does she?” In late 1998, Charles and Camilla both sensed that the furor over Diana’s death had weakened the monarch and left an opening. He rashly allowed his press secretary, Mark Bolland, to leak the story that the Prince of Wales would be “privately delighted” if the Queen abdicated. Furious, Elizabeth summoned her son to Buckingham Palace, demanded that he explain, and then insisted on— and got— a profuse apology. (pg 292)
The Queen, however, was nothing if not a realist. In late September 2015, she let it be known to her staff that, after the death of her husband, she intended to leave Buckingham Palace and make Balmoral her primary residence. At about the same time, the Queen’s and Charles’s communications departments were quietly merged under the control of one of the Prince’s most senior courtiers— “another clear indication,” said
the Times, “that major changes are afoot.” (pg 296)
Interesting given where she ultimately died, after her husband's death.
There are those who persist in believing that the Queen will never abdicate, that the mere idea is anathema to her. Yet an awful lot of “nevers” have come to pass since Diana and Charles were wed thirty-five years ago. The Queen would never agree to pay income taxes. She did (and so did the rest of the Royal Family). The Queen would never give up the royal yacht Britannia. She did. The Queen would never open the doors of Buckingham Palace to the public. She has. The Queen would never allow her son and heir to divorce. She did. The Queen would never visit Ireland, and no Royal would ever shake hands with leaders of the Irish Republican Army. Elizabeth was the first British monarch to visit the Republic of Ireland, and Charles shook hands with Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams thirty-six years after Adams gloated over the IRA’s murder of his great-uncle Lord Mountbatten. There would never be an end to the thirteen-hundred-year-old law of primogeniture. There was. Would the monarch ever deign to ride in a taxicab, lift a pint at a pub, or eat at McDonald’s? Her Majesty has done all of these things, and, determined not to be left out of the information age, she has also availed herself of
Google, Facebook, and Twitter.
From the day she climbed down from a fig tree in Africa to assume the burdens of monarchy, Elizabeth II has been guided by a sense of duty to her subjects. Buffeted by the winds of change, the Queen also has shown a willingness to adapt to the times, if such was required to sustain the institutions and traditions she held dear.
To be sure, retirement would not be easy for history’s longest-reigning, hardest-working sovereign. However, once convinced by Sir Christopher Geidt and others that it was needed to save the House of Windsor, it was just one last sacrifice she was willing to make. (pgs 297 and 298)
Apparently not.
Elizabeth II has done more than just hope and dream this will happen. In the nineteen years since Diana’s death threatened to sink the monarchy, she has deftly steered it away from the rocks and into open water. Even more treacherous seas lie ahead.
Before William can assume command, the House of Windsor will have
to survive the reign of Charles III and Camilla— “The Rottweiler,” “That Wicked, Wicked Woman,” the next undoubted Queen of England. (pg 299)
The treacherous seas lie is especially interesting given that two figures who caused the most damage-control for the monarchy in recent years, Prince Andrew and Prince Harry, are barely mentioned. Also, this was published just before Brexit.
As the Queen celebrates her ninetieth birthday and her sixty-fourth year on the throne in 2016, she has— again, largely thanks to the rebel princess Diana— proven herself to be a modern sovereign, able to adapt to the times and do what is necessary for the monarchy, and, more important, for her people. (pg 301)
For my complaints about the substance of this book, I will say that's a nice, diplomatic way of putting it that shames neither woman.
Final Grade: A (with reservations)
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