Copyright

William Collins

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WilliamCollinsBooks.com

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020

Copyright © Robert Lacey 2020

Cover image © Getty Images.com/WPA Pool/Pool/Julian Parker/PA Photos

Robert Lacey asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Extracts from Notes on a Nervous Planet by Matt Haig reproduced by permission of Canongate Books Ltd. Copyright © Matt Haig, 2018.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Source ISBN: 9780008408510

Ebook Edition © October 2020 ISBN: 9780008408527

Version: 2020-10-08

Dedication

To my brother,

Graham

– and also to my darling

Jane and Scarlett

who inspired me every day

Contents

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Dedication

5  Contents

6  List of Illustrations

7  1 Brothers at War

8 2 Family Matters

9  3 Dynastic Marriage

10  4 Agape

11  5 ‘Whatever “in love” Means’

12  6 Party Pieces

13  7 An Heir and a ‘Spare’

14  8 Bringing Up Babies

15  9 Entitlement

16  10 Exposure

17  11 Camillagate

18  12 Uncle James

19  13 People’s Princess

20  14 Scallywag

21  15 Forget-me-not

22  16 Wobble

23  17 Kate’s Hot!

24  18 Kate’s Not!

25  19 Line of Duty

26  20 Fantasy of Salvation

27  21 White Knight

28  22 In Vogue

29  23 End of the Double Act

30  24 Different Paths

31  25 Christmas Message

32  26 Sandringham Showdown

33  27 Abbey Farewell

34  28 Social Distancing

35  Picture Section

36  Source Notes

37  Acknowledgements

38  Bibliography

39  Also by Robert Lacey

40  About the Author

41  About the Publisher

LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

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Illustrations

1st section

Prince and Princess of Wales at Highgrove with William and Harry, 1986 (Tim Graham Photo Library/Getty Images)

Prince Charles with Princess Anne, 1954 (Camera Press)

Prince of Wales’s wedding, 1981 (Lichfield Archive/Getty Images)

Lady Diana Spencer and Camilla Parker Bowles, 1980 (Express Newspapers/Archive Photos/Getty Images)

Prince Harry and Prince William, 1985 (Tim Graham Photo Library/Getty Images)

Princess Diana with Princes William and Harry, 1997 (John Swannell/Camera Press)

Prince Harry at Trooping the Colour, 1989 (Anwar Hussein/Getty Images)

Diana in minefield, 1997 (Tim Graham Photo Library/Getty Images)

Princess Diana presenting polo trophy to James Hewitt, 1989 (Iain Burns/Camera Press)

Princess Diana in car with Dodi Fayed, 1997 (Sipa Press/Shutterstock)

Funeral service of Princess of Wales, 1997 (Jeff J. Mitchell/AFP/Getty Images)

Funeral of Princess of Wales with flowers, 1997 (Wayne Starr/Camera Press)

2nd section

Prince William at Eton, 2000 (Anwar Hussein/WireImage/Getty Images)

Prince William and Kate Middleton at St Andrews University, 2005 (Royal/Alamy Stock Photo)

Kate Middleton on catwalk, 2002 (Malcolm Clarke/Daily Mail/Shutterstock)

Wedding of Prince William, 2011 (George Pimentel/Getty Images)

Wedding of Prince of Wales, 2005 (Hugo Burnand/Getty Images)

Duke and Duchess of Cambridge at Lindo Wing with Prince George, 2013 (Alan Chapman/Film Magic/Getty Images)

Making a Difference Together, 2018 (Goff Photos.com)

Fab Four at Sandringham, 2017 (Karen Anvil/Goff Photos.com)

Kate and Meghan at Wimbledon, 2019 (Karwai Tang/Getty Images)

Queen at Christmas, 2019 (Steve Parsons/Getty Images)

Prince William, Kate Middleton and their children at Trooping the Colour, 2019 (JS/Dana Press Photos/PA Images)

3rd section

Prince Harry in Afghanistan, 2008 (PA Photos/Topfoto)

Prince Harry in car after hospital visit, 1988 (Mirrorpix)

Princes in Botswana, 2010 (Chris Jackson/Getty Images)

Meghan and family (News Licensing)

Meghan Markle in Suits, Season 1, 2011 (Frank Ockenfels/Alamy Stock Photo)

Meghan and her mother on their way to the wedding, 2018 (Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty Images)

Prince Charles with Doria Ragland and the Duchess of Cornwall, 2018 (Jane Barlow/WPA Pool/Getty Images)

Duchess of Sussex and Queen Elizabeth II, 2018 (Samir Hussein/Samir Hussein/WireImage/Getty Images)

Meghan with women of the Hubb Community Kitchen, 2018 (Christmas Jackson/Getty Images)

Prince Harry, Meghan and their son Archie, 2019 (Dominic Lipinski-WPA Pool/Getty Images)

Meghan with Archie and Desmond Tutu, 2019 (Toby Melville/Samir Hussein/Getty Images)

Prince Harry on Abbey Road, 2020 (Samir Hussein/Getty Images)

Commonwealth Day Service, 2020 (Phil Harris/Getty Images)

Cartoons

Harry and Meghan’s expulsion from Eden (Morten Morland/News Licensing)

The Queen writing to Roddy Llewellyn (Courtesy of the Mark Boxer Estate)

Royal infidelities featuring Charles, Camilla, Diana and James Hewitt (Mirrorpix/Reach Licensing)

Crocodile tears of the media (Chris Riddell/Guardian News & Media)

‘I’m having a ghastly nightmare’ by Cummings (Reproduced with kind permission of the Cummings family)

Fergie’s toe-licking (Tom Johnston/News Licensing)

Harry’s paternity (Ben Coppin, animator and illustrator)

Tidal wave of flowers on Diana’s death (Gerald Scarfe/News Licensing)

Diana as Queen of Hearts (Peter Brookes/News Licensing)

The Queen gives orders to James Bond (Ben Coppin, animator and illustrator)

Camilla and Charles as potted and potty (Peter Brookes/News Licensing)

Camilla and Charles ‘Gotcha!’ (Reproduced with the permission of Private Eye Magazine)

Harry in Afghanistan (Peter Brookes/News Licensing)

Queen and Philip respond to the Markles’ arrival (Peter Brookes/News Licensing)

Gallery of Prince Andrew scandal (Peter Brookes/News Licensing)

Sussex Royal commercialisation controversy (Morten Morland/News Licensing)

Harry and Meghan’s ‘Souvenir Issue’ (Reproduced with the permission of Private Eye Magazine)

Allowing the ‘Sussex Royal’ name (Peter Brookes/News Licensing)

‘He could have been the next Prince Andrew!’ (Morten Morland/News Licensing)

Harry and Meghan with zip masks (Paul Thomas/Daily Mail)

Harry and Meghan on coronavirus and the press (Morten Morland/News Licensing)

The pumpkin carriage (Peter Brookes/News Licensing)

1
Brothers at War

‘There are disagreements, obviously, as all families have, and when there are, they are big disagreements.’

(Prince William, BBC News, 19 November 2004)

Talk to each other, for God’s sake! That was the way Diana had raised her boys – to get their feelings fully out in the open in a direct fashion, not stumbling and mumbling into their emotional cups of tea like so many other members of the Windsor clan. ‘Never complain, never explain!’ – what kind of philosophy for life was that?

Thanks to their mother, William and Harry had grown up to be two expressive straight-talkers – and ambitious world-changers too. Their straight-talking – along with their attempts at changing – make up the substance of this book. And we jump into our story in May 2019 with the birth of Prince Harry’s first child and the chance that this happy event offered the two battling brothers to reconcile – to embrace and to make up. Would they take it?

There had been tiffs and troubles before, of course, in the run-up to the wedding – you know, that little wedding at Windsor Castle between the Anglo-Saxon prince and the American, mixed-race, divorcee TV star in the spring of 2018 that attracted some 1.9 billion viewers around the world. What family wedding would be complete without a few family hiccups: a disputed bridesmaid’s outfit here, a missing tiara there – and oh yes, an absentee father of the bride?

But twelve months later, almost to the day (19 May 2018 to 6 May 2019), here was the fruit of the blessed union about to arrive, a springtime baby to thrill its parents and to bring all the family back together again – especially those two Windsor brothers and their allegedly warring wives.

Royal births, like royal weddings, are the human happenings that cement the affections of a modern people to its monarchy. Constitutional historians like to explain the theory – the paradox of how a modern democracy can actually be strengthened by the elitist and undemocratic traditions of an ancient crown. But there’s nothing like the practical appeal of a newborn baby in its swaddled slumber – the fresh arrival of new life that encourages life for all.

Just as with coronations and royal weddings, a set of popular ceremonies has developed around royal births in the age of mass communications – the jostling crowd outside the hospital, the smiling parents with their baby on the steps, the shouted compliments, the flashguns exploding. Then later, the quieter, more formal christening photograph and the announcement of all the godparents’ names.

That’s how Charles and Diana set the modern style in 1982. Their son William, on 21 June that year, was the first ever heir to the British throne to be born in a regular hospital – St Mary’s in west London, right beside Paddington railway station and smelling not a little of the trains. Charles’s sister, Princess Anne, had discovered the attractions of St Mary’s private maternity wing – named after the philanthropic Portuguese-Jewish Lindo family – for the births of her children Peter (b.1977) and Zara (b.1981). Harry followed two years after William on 15 September 1984 to make up a royal quartet of Lindo births.

When William himself became a father, he and Kate adopted the same tradition, choosing Lindo for their children, George (b.2013), Charlotte (b.2015) and Louis (b.2018). By this last date the footmarks of proud royal parents displaying their newborn to the world had almost worn grooves into those stone steps at Paddington. There was an anthropological thesis to be written on the success of populist monarchies who chose to display their offspring outside railway stations at birth: Austria’s archdukes snootily kept their child production away from the public eye, and who now cared about the archdukes – in Austria or anywhere else in the world?

In May 2019, however, Harry and Meghan had decided that they did not want to display their newborn baby on those steps outside the Lindo Wing. They wanted to be royal in a new style – and maybe not royal at all. And to understand why this mattered so much, we have to go back in royal history – to the legend of the warming pan.

The warming pan was the electric blanket or rubber hot water bottle of its day, a couple of centuries back. Before his lordship retired for the night, his chambermaid would heat up his sheets by smoothing them energetically with the warming pan – a large, flat, circular brass container on the end of a long wooden handle, with a high curved lid that meant it could hold a generous quantity of red-hot coals from the fireplace. Or a newborn baby …

Such a warming pan, it was alleged, had been used in 1688 to smuggle a healthy substitute baby into the birthing bed of Mary of Modena, wife of the hated Catholic King James II, replacing the legitimate heir who was said to have been born sickly. Until 1688 the unpopular monarch had been tolerated because his successor was going to be his Protestant sister Mary and her still more Protestant Dutch husband, William of Orange. Loyal anti-Catholic Brits had hoped that the generally popular and non-popish couple would succeed the childless and far-too-popish James as joint monarchs, William-and-Mary, thus preserving what passed for democracy in those days – as well as the Church of England.

The unexpected appearance of the living and healthy ‘warming pan’ baby, James Francis Edward Stuart, however, threatened this scheme – and 1688 turned into a landmark year in the history of Britain’s monarchy. William of Orange sailed his invasion fleet into Torbay that November, bloodlessly persuading James II to flee London with his warming pan son.

The ‘Glorious Revolution’ was British history’s memorable moniker for the stirring events of 1688 and its resulting settlement that became the model for our modern system of enhanced and democratic powers for Parliament and reduced powers for an increasingly symbolic ‘constitutional’ monarchy. Alongside the theoretical changes came the very practical provision that all royal births must, in future, be personally attended by the home secretary of the day, whose job it would be to make sure that the new royal arrival had been delivered properly, and not in a warming pan.

So, well into modern times, attendance beside the royal birthing bed became the duty of every British home secretary. Queen Victoria gave birth to all nine of her children with her home secretary in the room, along with assorted privy councillors – and this intrusive custom lasted long into the twentieth century. Sir William Joynson-Hicks was present at the birth of the future Queen Elizabeth II at her parents’ London townhouse in April 1926, and, four years later, his Labour successor, John Robert Clynes, had to travel up to Glamis Castle in Scotland to be at the birth of her sister Margaret – he found himself stranded there with a single, operator-controlled telephone line for two whole weeks because the princess arrived late.

In November 1948 Prince Charles became the first post-1688 heir to the British throne to be born without the ritualised scrutiny of his arrival on behalf of the people. Clement Attlee’s post-war Labour government had wasted no time in sweeping away the outdated practice. But Charles revived its spirit in 1982 and 1984 with the births of William and Harry, when he and Diana proudly – and dutifully – brought their sons out onto the steps of the Lindo Wing for public inspection and approval, within hours of their births.

Prince William continued the tradition unquestioningly – though by 2013 the performance had turned into a menacing and undignified scrum among the ever-growing mass of paparazzi, in a most alarming free-for-all. But William still did his duty sturdily, beside him Kate, immaculate and smiling despite the traumas of delivery. As an heir to the throne who had done his homework, Prince William knew about warming pans and the importance of making the people feel that you were at one with them.

But as the ‘spare’, his younger brother had received no such special instruction in the ancient legend, let alone its sociological importance – and if he had, Harry could not have cared less. The heir could choose to suffer the ordeal of inspection on the Paddington steps if he wished. The spare had other ideas, and his wife totally agreed. Harry and Meghan were resolute that their newborn baby’s first sight of the world should not be the same insane and lethal camera-flashings that had attended – had actually brought about – the death of Diana.

A cursory glance at the photograph of baby Harry in his mother’s arms outside the Lindo Wing in September 1984 also suggested that Diana must have spent a good hour or more washing and blow-drying her hair before she emerged onto the steps for her ‘spontaneous’ greeting of the people. Cautious Kate might put up with all that primping and prepping for the sake of ‘the Firm’, but mercurial Meghan would not.

So Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, had agreed that their new child should be delivered at home in the peace and seclusion of Frogmore ‘Cottage’ – not so much a cottage, in fact, as a collection of cottages in Windsor Great Park that had recently been renovated and amalgamated into a long, twenty-three-room dwelling at a cost of some £2.4 million in public funds. Here was another mildly difficult issue. If the royal parents were not going to display their baby to the public for the sake of warming pans, what about all those pots and pans and cooker(s) in their lovely new kitchen? Perhaps some public gesture would be appreciated to say thank you for all that taxpayers’ money?

As events turned out, the question would be academic. Baby Sussex took his time a’coming, and when his expected arrival became two weeks late Meghan’s doctor (a secret, whose name has not been revealed to this day) advised a hospital-assisted delivery. Frimley Park was a perfectly good NHS hospital a dozen miles down the road near Farnborough, but the couple set off instead with Meghan’s mother Doria on the longer journey to London and Britain’s most expensive delivery facility, the US-owned Portland Hospital, famous for its celebrity births. Victoria Beckham, Liz Hurley, Kate Winslet – all these glamorous mothers had delivered their babies in the luxury of the Portland, where a basic birth package starts at £6,100, with four-poster cots for the babies. And not a nasty, smelly railway station in sight.

Here was another issue with Harry and Meghan – the deluxe, five-star instincts to which these reach-out-and-touch-me tribunes of the common people so regularly surrendered, from their fondness for private jets and Hollywood friends to their need to ‘hide away’ in expensively renovated twenty-three-room ‘cottages’ or, when they first moved to California in 2020, an $18 million, twelve-bathroom Tuscan-style mansion occupying twenty-two acres in Los Angeles’ exclusive Beverly Ridge Estates.

‘It’s a matter of security,’ their handlers would explain. ‘And they DO need their privacy.’

But the Portland Hospital did its job efficiently and confidentially through the night of 5 May 2019. On the morning of 6 May, Meghan was duly delivered of her delayed but healthy son, weighing in at 7lbs 3oz. Baby Archie had arrived with the dawn at 5.26 a.m., allowing grandmother Doria and the happy couple to return to Windsor with their precious cargo undetected. Their stratagem was bolstered by Buckingham Palace’s putting out a strangely misleading statement at 2 p.m. that day saying that the Duchess of Sussex was just going into labour – when she had, in fact, been delivered of her new son eight hours earlier.

Harry and Meghan had played fast and loose with both royal tradition and the truth, but for once they had successfully outwitted the hated press.

2
Family Matters

‘He is the one person on this earth that I can actually talk to about anything and we understand each other.’

(Prince Harry, January 2006)

The helpful ‘friends’ who brief the media from time to time about the inner thoughts of royal folk have let it be known that elder brother William did not think too highly of Harry and Meghan’s ‘prima donna’ manoeuvres to conceal the birth of their son in May 2019 – and this impression was confirmed by the failure of William and Kate to visit the new arrival for a full eight days. By contrast, the Queen, Prince Philip, Charles and Camilla all turned up within hours to coo over the baby – and it seemed strange that, when the Cambridges did finally pitch up more than a week later, they didn’t bring along little George, Charlotte and Louis to welcome their new cousin.

But Harry won the next round. On 8 May he had appeared with Meghan cradling the two-day-old Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor in the soaring and magnificent surroundings of St George’s Hall, Windsor, with the press pack excluded. There was just a single photographer of their choice and a small group of TV cameras with whom they spoke of their joy.

‘It’s magic, it’s pretty amazing,’ declared Meghan. ‘I have the two best guys in the world, so I’m really happy.’

‘He has the sweetest temperament,’ disclosed Harry. ‘He’s really calm. I don’t know who he gets that from!’

The name ‘Archie’ was said by Sandhurst mates to have been inspired by a mentor of Harry’s in the army – Major Tom Archer-Burton – while the baby’s mother offered a posher clarification. ‘Arche’, the Duchess of Sussex explained, was a term from classical Greek meaning ‘origin’ or ‘source of action’ – Meghan had picked up more classical learning at school in Los Angeles than ever Harry had at Eton – and the couple would later bestow the same name on their charitable foundation. As for Harrison, well, that was sort of a joke – ‘Harry’s son’ – leading some commentators to wonder if the name had anything to do with the mystic and meditational aura of George Harrison, Meghan’s particular idol in the Beatles.

Swaddled in a white blanket and wearing a delicate white knitted hat, little Archie appeared to sleep peacefully throughout his first official photo call – which was, of course, exactly as his father and mother had planned it.

‘Thank you, everybody,’ said Meghan, ‘for all the well wishes and kindness. It just means so much.’

The entire private-public occasion was just pitch-perfect – with the splendid lofted windows of St George’s providing the ideal backdrop – a touch of history along with modernity: it was Harry the father who, fifty-fifty parenting style, was cradling the baby, not the mother, unlike every previous photograph on those wretched Paddington steps.

And then came an even warmer family occasion when the proud parents were shown presenting Archie to the Queen, Prince Philip and Doria. The picture made the front page of every British newspaper – and a good many others around the world – with the two grandmothers, black and white, smiling down on the British monarchy’s first mixed-race baby.

‘How any woman does what they do is beyond comprehension,’ remarked Harry in one of his post-birth interviews. ‘It’s been the most amazing experience I could ever have possibly imagined.’

But here came the real crunch: the godparents. An essential component of any Church of England christening process, these adult mentors who will guide the new baby spiritually, morally and often materially through life are considered even more important for members of the royal family. Technically, they carry the title of ‘sponsor’.

Numbers six and seven in the order of succession may not seem particularly close to inheriting the crown, but who knows what can happen in an age of mass terrorist attack and global pandemics. Six and seven could well get promoted to three and four – or even higher. And, more profoundly, anyone in the single figures – Harry stands at six at the time of writing, Archie at seven – is certainly ‘royal’ whether they like it or not, since they have been sanctified by the public’s emotional commitment to them, as well as by taxpayers’ largesse.

It is well understood at Buckingham Palace that not all godparents can make it to a hastily arranged christening service. So in July 2019, Elizabeth II’s Holyrood Week duties in Scotland meant that she and Prince Philip could not attend the ceremony for Archie on 6 July. And this date had already been the result of some shuffling of schedules to accommodate the busy summer diaries of Charles, Camilla, William and Kate – not to mention the Archbishop of Canterbury who was to preside over the rite.

Yet it is still expected by monarch, palace and just about anyone with a stake in the game that the world should be told who the new royal baby’s ‘sponsors’ are. How can you judge the suitability of a sponsor who remains unknown? ‘Secret sponsor’ has a dodgy sound to it. And it is an ingredient of Britain’s representative monarchy that Brits should have the right to know who is giving moral guidance to their possible future king or queen. Here again, however, precedent, protocol and practice all collided headlong with Harry and Meghan’s firm insistence on their privacy – and that of their new baby.

‘Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor will be christened in a small private ceremony by the Archbishop of Canterbury in the Private Chapel at Windsor Castle on Saturday 6th July,’ announced Buckingham Palace in a statement on 3 July. ‘The Duke and Duchess of Sussex look forward to sharing some images taken on the day by photographer Chris Allerton. The [names of the] godparents, in keeping with their wishes, will remain private.’

Confirming the palace announcement, the Sussex Royal office made clear that the whole ‘sponsor’ issue was non-negotiable. The godparents’ names would not be revealed.

‘I’ve covered five or six christenings in my royal career,’ commented Majesty magazine’s editor-in-chief Ingrid Seward on the Today programme. ‘And I’ve never come across such secrecy.’

Was brother William outraged? Just angry? Or merely perplexed?

‘Friends’ tried to keep the temperature down by suggesting the last – that the future king, only five places clear of Archie in the order of succession, could not comprehend how such a basic matter of constitutional principle had been misunderstood. How could any new Windsor royal be christened in a meaningful sense without the newcomer’s sponsors being known, if not present?

William was smiling after a fashion on the morning of Saturday, 6 July, when he turned up for his nephew Archie’s christening in the Queen’s Private Chapel at Windsor, and the family photograph that would follow in the formality of the Green Drawing Room. But it was a wry and curious smile, and commentators had a field day interpreting what the prince’s face and posture – and those of his wife – might portend. Kate was thoughtfully wearing a pair of her late mother-in-law’s pearl drop earrings – the very pair that Diana was said to have worn to Harry’s christening in 1984. Yet Kate was sitting rather ‘awkwardly upright’, thought body language expert Judi James. The duchess was leaning forward in a ‘ready to flee’ posture.

This was nothing, however, when compared to Ms James’s verdict on William, standing to attention behind his wife with a ‘fig leaf hand clasp’ shielding his trouser crotch, in her opinion, and a ‘raised chin pose that a policeman might adopt before collaring a suspect’.

A few Internet commentators agreed. ‘William looks like he would rather be elsewhere,’ tweeted one, with another ‘royal fan’ responding, ‘William should have a much bigger smile on his face.’

Oh, the lot of a future king! Was this the captious and carping destiny for which Prince William, second in line to the throne, had been working for over twenty years since his visits to Windsor Castle for lunch with his grandmother the Queen in the late 1990s? Aged thirteen in the autumn of 1995, the prince had just started school at Eton College, the exclusive all-male academy (founded 1440) across the Thames from Windsor.

It was then three years after his parents’ separation – just two years before Diana’s death – and the Queen was worried about her grandson’s state of mind. Was Charles too wrapped up in his own concerns to be a proper father, with that Camilla Parker Bowles and everything else in the picture? While Diana, of course, with her motley succession of largely foreign boyfriends, was deliberately acting as a subversive anti-royal ‘flake’. The Queen actually feared that the boy might be heading for some sort of breakdown, she confided to one of her advisors – just as the prince’s mother herself had clearly cracked up mentally in several respects.

The Duke of Edinburgh intervened. Philip shared his wife’s concerns and he suggested that she overcome her longstanding aversion to involvement in messy family matters by trying to get closer to this particular boy – who was not just her fragile grandson, but a future inheritor of her crown. Perhaps the lad could come up and join them both in the castle from time to time on a Sunday, when the Eton boys were allowed out into the town?

And so the lunches had begun. Every few Sundays – allowing for the weekends that William would spend with his separated mother or father – the teenager would walk along Eton High Street with his detective, and across the bridge up to Windsor, where he would join the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh for a hearty and tasty meal.

Pudding ended, Philip would make a discreet exit, leaving his wife and grandson together in the panelled Oak Room with its six-arm chandelier hanging over the table in front of Queen Victoria’s beautiful Gobelins tapestry of The Hunt. In this splendid and historic but also intimate setting, grandmother and grandson – monarch and future heir – would get down to brass tacks, talking and ‘sharing’ as only the pair of them could.

‘There’s a serenity about her,’ William revealed ten years later, talking to the Queen’s 2011 biographer Robert Hardman, and explaining how his grandmother had encouraged him to stay calm in the face of all that the world would throw at him one day. ‘I think if you are of an age, you have a pretty old-fashioned faith, you do your best every day and say your prayers every night. Well, if you’re criticised for it, you’re not going to get much better whatever you do. What’s the point of worrying?’

It was during these conversations in the Oak Room that Prince William learned from his grandmother how the institution of the crown was something to be upheld and respected, and how one might have to fight – he might have to become quite tough, in fact – in order to preserve it. It was William’s birthright and legacy, after all, as much as his gran’s. The prince was particularly impressed by the stories that his grandmother would tell him about her own early years on the throne – how she had had to step in to succeed her father King George VI in 1952, at the age of only twenty-five, to tackle a job that many men in those days believed they could do better.

‘It must have been very daunting,’ he said to Hardman. ‘And I think how loads of twenty-five-year-olds – myself, my brother and lots of people included – didn’t have anything like that. And we didn’t have the extra pressure put on us at that age. It’s amazing that she didn’t crack. She just carried on and kept going. And that’s the thing about her. You present a challenge in front of her and she’ll climb it. And I think that to be doing that for sixty years – it’s incredible.’

Talking to the BBC in 2005, as he neared the end of his studies at St Andrews University, William would again pay tribute to the personal support and advice that his grandmother gave him.

‘She’s just very helpful on any sort of difficulties or problems I might be having,’ he said. ‘She’s been brilliant, she’s a real role model.’

It was in the Oak Room conversations that William would have heard of warming pans and the Glorious Revolution, along with the role that the armed services would have to play in his future. Then there was the importance of the Church of England in his responsibilities as monarch – though none of this was presented to him in any formal, lecturing sort of way.

‘I don’t think she believes too heavily in instruction,’ he said in 2016, expanding to the BBC on the subject of the Queen’s personal style and input, which he described as ‘more of a soft, influencing, modest kind of guidance’.

The Queen herself had received formal constitutional history lessons. In a curious mirror image of William, the young Princess Elizabeth used to walk over the Thames between Eton and Windsor twice a week in the months before the Second World War, when she was thirteen – but in the opposite direction. Accompanied by her nanny Marion Crawford (‘Crawfie’), the princess had gone for history tutorials to the book-littered study of Sir Henry Marten, the Vice-Provost of Eton, an eccentric scholar whose habit, while ruminating, was to crunch on sugar lumps that he shared with his pet raven.

One of Sir Henry’s particular enthusiasms had been the recent creation of the British Commonwealth of Nations, formalised by the Statute of Westminster of 1931, and the ingenious arrangement by which the Commonwealth contained at that date more than half a dozen monarchies – Canada and Australia, for example. There Elizabeth’s father George VI did not reign as some remote imperial sovereign in London, but as Canada’s or Australia’s very own king and head of state.

Elizabeth II was particularly proud of having developed and built upon this decentralised system in the course of her reign – by the year 2000 there were no fewer than fourteen Commonwealth monarchies around the world – and she passed on to William the importance of maintaining Britain’s Commonwealth links, especially in Africa, the Pacific, the Caribbean, the Indian subcontinent and other developing corners of the globe. And all this, of course, came on top of the challenge to the young man of having to prove himself one day as a dignified and respected – but not too posh and remote – truly ‘representative’ monarch of the United Kingdom at home to the satisfaction of the fractious Brits.

As William absorbed his grandmother’s principles, there was a sense, he later described, in which he became as one with her, establishing a warm personal closeness – a strong and quite extraordinary partnership across the generations that he defined as a ‘shared understanding of what’s needed’.

The prince’s conversations in the Oak Room helped to turn the fragile schoolboy heading for a breakdown into quite a tough young man who would once be compared to a ‘nightclub bouncer’ protecting the standards of and entry to his highly exclusive royal club. The prince was not prepared to allow anyone – and certainly not his brother and his American celebrity wife – to threaten the precious legacy that had been entrusted to him by his gran.

‘She cares not for celebrity, that’s for sure,’ William declared in 2011. ‘That’s not what monarchy’s about. It’s about setting examples. It’s about doing one’s duty, as she would say. It’s about using your position for the good. It’s about serving the country – and that’s really the crux of it.’

Brother Harry might be heading for La-La Land, but brother William was heading to be king.

‘I’ve put my arm round his shoulder all our lives together,’ said the prince to a friend, explaining why Harry and Meghan’s behaviour and the succession of erratic decisions surrounding Archie’s birth and christening – particularly the weird concealing of the godparents – had led to the rupture between the brothers that Harry would describe later that year as the pursuit of ‘different paths’.

‘I can’t do it any more,’ said William.

The identity of those ‘secret’ godparents, of course, did not stay secret for very long. Secrets will out, and the names of Archie’s three British sponsors became public within months of his christening.

Tiggy Pettifer, née Legge-Bourke, had been the beloved nanny of both William and Harry. Mark Dyer had played a similarly formative role in the lives of the young princes – ‘a former equerry to the Prince of Wales’, as The Times described him, ‘who became a mentor and close friend to Charles’ sons’. Then there was Charlie van Straubenzee, one of Harry’s closest childhood friends and Eton schoolmates. Meghan and Harry had attended his wedding in August 2018.

A combination of newspaper digging and high society contacts got these three British names on the record by the end of 2019, and, once out there, the names were not denied by Buckingham Palace, the Sussex Royal office, nor the godparents themselves. The question was – who were the others? The three British names clearly represented Harry’s choices of sponsor. So the focus turned upon whom Meghan might have chosen.

If there were three British sponsors, logic suggested there must be one, two or three American sponsors. And the three US names on whom speculation, informed or otherwise, centred were tennis star Serena Williams, film star George Clooney and one or other of the political star couple, ex-President Barack and Michelle Obama. All four were friends of Meghan, who had gone to watch Serena at Wimbledon in the summer of 2019, while George Clooney had already cheerily dismissed the rumours in a cleverly crafted non-denial denial.

‘You don’t want me to be a godparent of anybody,’ Clooney said at the time of Archie’s birth. ‘I’m barely a parent at this point. It’s frightening.’

When it came to the Obamas, the husband and wife team were close to both Meghan and Harry. Barack Obama had joined the prince in Toronto in 2017 at the Invictus Games for injured ex-servicemen and women – Harry’s own creation and one of his most dearly cherished causes – while Michelle had written an article for the UK issue of Vogue that Meghan had guest-edited in September 2019 – see Chapter 22 for more on that. Certain American commentators even wondered whether the Obamas were not encouraging the new duchess to pick up their liberal political legacy at some time in the future – on the way to Meghan achieving her teenage ambition to give the United States its first mixed-race female president.

Such fanciful imaginings showed what can happen when you seek to divert the truth from its natural course – and the course of this book is to seek to reveal the truth. The pages that follow will narrate the story of two brave young men who have lived through extraordinary privilege and tragedy, each of them challenged from birth by their ultimately different destinies. For many years, the two brothers would work together, supporting each other in times of trouble. But as time and circumstance have changed, so William and Harry have, inevitably, grown in different directions.

In recent months – even as this book was being written – we saw the younger of the pair finding himself a new identity and seeking to follow, with his wife, a new way ahead. In Shakespearean terms, Prince Harry has decided to throw off his old and troubled past – the dissolute world of Falstaff and Prince Hal – to remake himself in the fresh and shining role of King Henry V, British history’s heroic and exemplary monarch: ‘Oh, happy band! Oh, band of brothers …’

The trouble is that brother William has claimed that job already.

3
Dynastic Marriage

‘Marriage is a much more important business than falling in love …’

(Prince Charles, 1979)

So you are approaching the age of thirty. You are a single male of the species – reasonably attractive if rather shy, and not very sexy. You are heir to the throne of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland – plus Canada, Australia, New Zealand and a dozen or so other Commonwealth monarchies – and you have your love life to organise.

No, sorry, you have a future queen to locate for this formidable array of thrones.

Is there a difference?

Well, yes, there is, actually – and that dilemma provides the basis of the story that is at the heart of this book. Princes William and Harry were the products of an arranged dynastic alliance, not a love match …

As the future King Charles III responded to the nudgings of his family in the late 1970s to get on with the business of tracking down a lifetime companion, the Prince of Wales found himself on the horns of a dilemma – to which his great-uncle and ‘honorary grandfather’, Lord Mountbatten, had a solution that he would reiterate with relish:

‘I believe, in a case like yours,’ wrote Mountbatten to Charles on Valentine’s Day, 1974, ‘that a man should sow his wild oats and have as many affairs as he can before settling down. But for a wife he should choose a suitable, attractive, and sweet-charactered girl before she has met anyone else she might fall for.’

It was a measure of Charles’s shyness that he did not tell his interfering ‘Uncle Dickie’ to stuff his cynical advice where the monkey puts his nuts, since his ‘honorary grandfather’ was not only peddling the values of a vanished age, he was also pushing the candidacy of his own granddaughter, Amanda Knatchbull, just sixteen, as the ‘suitable, attractive, and sweet-charactered girl’ whom Charles should eventually select as his future queen – thus bringing even more Mountbatten blood into the dynasty of Windsor.

Nine years his junior, Amanda knew the prince well, and in time she would come genuinely to love Charles, in her grandfather’s opinion. But as a teenager she was clearly too young to commit to marriage – so the old man’s worldly counsel was offered in the hope that his great-nephew would ‘keep’ himself for Amanda.

‘I am sure,’ Charles responded a few weeks later, ‘that she must know that I am very fond of her …’

In the event, Charles’s and Mountbatten’s imaginative ambitions for Amanda Knatchbull – discussed in her total absence and ignorance – came to naught. Over the years the two cousins did grow close, developing a mutual respect and friendship that has lasted to the present day. But when the prince finally made his proposal in the summer of 1979 – shortly before Lord Mountbatten’s assassination by the IRA – the independent-minded Amanda politely turned him down.

‘The surrender of self to a system,’ she explained, was so absolute when joining the royal family, it involved a loss of independence ‘far greater than matrimony usually invites’.

These powerful if formal words come to us via the memory of Prince Charles, as he recounted the details of his rejection to his biographer Jonathan Dimbleby. The prince could recall every reason Amanda had given him for her refusal – and especially ‘the exposure to publicity, an intrusion more pervasive than attends any other public figure except at the zenith of a chosen career’.

‘Her response,’ concluded Dimbleby, ‘served only to confirm his own belief that to marry into the House of Windsor was a sacrifice that no-one should be expected to make.’

The future king would clearly have to find himself another suitable and sweet-charactered girl. But in the meantime, Charles had enjoyed several years of success pursuing Uncle Dickie’s alternative line of advice on the sowing of wild oats, since he had made the acquaintance of a certain Camilla Parker Bowles (née Shand), a characterful lady noted for her sheer brass nerve. Long before her royal future was assured, Mrs Parker Bowles had taken her young children, Laura and Tom, shopping to Sainsbury’s in the Wiltshire market town of Chippenham.

‘Most of the parking spaces were filled,’ recalled Laura, ‘but Mummy saw an empty one right outside the front door and nipped in there. The parking space was “Reserved for the Mayor of Chippenham”.’

When the family came out with their shopping bags, a man stopped Camilla and asked her what she was doing in the mayor’s parking place.

‘Mummy smiled and said, “I’m so sorry, I’m the Mayor’s wife …” and hurried me into the car. The man followed us and said, “What a joy to meet you for the first time – I’m the Mayor!”’

The story gives credence to the scarcely believable tale of how Camilla is often said to have first introduced herself to Charles, sometime in the early 1970s. It was a pouring wet afternoon and the prince, aged twenty-two, was just stroking one of his ponies after a polo match on Smith’s Lawn in Windsor Great Park, when Camilla Shand, then twenty-four, approached for a chat – without any introduction.

‘That’s a fine animal, sir,’ she said. ‘I’m Camilla Shand.’

‘I’m so pleased to meet you,’ replied Charles politely – only for Camilla to dive straight in with a reference to her ancestor, the notorious Alice Keppel, mistress of King Edward VII.

‘You know, sir, my great-grandmother was the mistress of your great-great-grandfather – so how about it?’

This extraordinary tale puts the mayor of Chippenham to shame, and many of the prince’s biographers have questioned its reliability. Charles himself, via his semi-official biographer Dimbleby, is quite clear that although he did meet Camilla at the polo from time to time, he first met her properly in London, through his former girlfriend Lucia Santa Cruz, the Chilean research assistant of Lord Butler, who was the master of Trinity, Charles’s college at Cambridge.

Before he became master of Cambridge’s largest and poshest college, Richard Austen Butler, universally known after his initials as ‘Rab’, was a Tory grandee who had occupied numerous Cabinet ranks. But for all his record of public achievement, Rab’s fondest private boast was how he had used the Trinity Master’s Lodge to facilitate the liaison by which a ‘young South American had instructed an innocent Prince in the consummation of physical love’. In 1978 Butler indiscreetly told the author Anthony Holden, who was writing a semi-authorised biography of Prince Charles, that he had ‘slipped’ Lucia Santa Cruz a key to the Master’s Lodge, after Charles had asked if the young lady could stay there with him ‘for privacy’.

When Holden’s book was published in 1979, Buckingham Palace indignantly denied Rab’s suggestion that Lucia had initiated Charles into the delights of the sexual dimension.

‘Most of what Rab Butler says is preposterous,’ complained the prince himself, fiercely denying that Butler was any sort of ‘mentor’, ‘guru’ or ‘éminence grise’ to him.

But Butler’s wife Mollie stood by her husband’s claim in quite explicit terms. Lucia, she wrote in her own 1992 memoir, was a ‘happy example of someone on whom [Charles] could safely cut his teeth, if I may put it thus’.

Sometime in the spring of 1972, Santa Cruz, who had remained friendly with Charles after Trinity, invited him round for a drink at her Cundy Street flat in Victoria, at the back of Buckingham Palace, saying that she had found ‘just the girl’ for the prince. Camilla lived in the same block and Gyles Brandreth, a friend of Charles and a chronicler of the couple’s love affair, favours this version.

By contrast, however, another chronicler, Caroline Graham, sets the meeting on the polo field, quoting an onlooker as saying that Camilla ‘saw the Prince standing alone on the other side of the field. Cool as you like, she walked across and started talking to him.’

So which account is true? We should probably accept the less exciting Santa Cruz-Cundy Street version as the historical truth of the couple’s first meeting, since that is how the prince himself remembers it.

But when it comes to the tale of the polo field and the ‘mistress of your great-great-grandfather’ introduction, that surely expresses the more important emotional truth – that Camilla Shand embodied all the emotional freedom and sense of fun for which the dutiful Prince Charles had been yearning. With the benefit of hindsight, we can certainly cite those personal qualities as the reason why, nearly fifty years later, Charles and Camilla are living their lives together solidly as man and wife.

The fact that such a marriage between a future king and a non-royal divorcee is accepted today, but would have seemed outlandish thirty years ago – not to say improper and impossible – is another example of the social prejudices that confronted Prince Charles as he faced up to the challenge of choosing his partner for life in the mid-1970s.

The newspapers of the time were perfectly candid as they discussed the requirements for his future queen – and they were also perfectly candid that, as tribunes of the people, they had the right to lay down the rules. The candidate should preferably be royal (which meant foreign, exotic and newsworthy) or, failing that, noble – and she should definitely be a virgin, the v-word being deployed unashamedly in the age of free love as if during the reign of the first Elizabeth.

Camilla was none of these things. She had cast off her virginity long before, and she was neither royal nor noble, though she unquestionably came from respectable upper-middle-class ‘county’ stock. Her father, Major Bruce Shand, was a master of foxhounds who was a friend of the Queen Mother. Her mother Rosalind – the money in the family – descended from the Cubitts who had built Belgravia and the smartest swathes of central London. Camilla was not that young – she was two years older than Charles – and, to go back to the v-word, she was quite well known in society circles for being ‘a bit of a goer’.

But Ms Shand herself had the sharpness to see all these drawbacks, and she had the enticing honesty to go for the next best thing. She liked the prospect of some fun with Prince Charles for his own sake. She did not want to collar him just so that she could marry a future king – and that is fundamentally why, of course, she has ended up married to him.

The Goons played a big part in all this. Early in their friendship Charles and Camilla discovered that they shared a fondness for the silly accents and daft looks of The Goon Show – BBC radio’s classic comedy of the absurd, the Home Service predecessor to and, indeed, the original inspiration for Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The couple rapidly registered their mutual affection by bestowing Goon nicknames upon each other, ‘Fred’ and ‘Gladys’ – which, say friends, Charles and Camilla cheerfully call each other to this day.

‘Your spirits rise whenever Camilla comes into a room,’ recalled Charles’s polo-playing companion, Lord Patrick Beresford. ‘You can tell from her eyes and the smile on her face that you are going to have a bloody good laugh.’

‘They have a terrific sense of humour,’ says another friend, author Jilly Cooper. ‘They laugh together a huge amount. And Camilla’s ability to see the funny side of life has made an enormous difference over the years.’

Along with the shared silliness went a mutual delight in country pursuits. Charles and Camilla were both devotees of huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ – seldom happier than when decked out in their Barbours, tweeds and welly boots. Thanks to her father, Camilla could ride to hounds as well as the prince, and by the summer and autumn of 1972 the couple were wrapped up in a roaring affair.

‘She was affectionate, she was unassuming,’ wrote Jonathan Dimbleby, recording and reporting Charles’s feelings for this new girlfriend, ‘and – with all the intensity of first love – he lost his heart to her almost at once.’

Lord Mountbatten encouraged the romance. He entertained the couple frequently at discreet weekends at Broadlands, his estate in Hampshire. In 1971–2 Charles was starting his naval career at Portsmouth, just half an hour to the south, and Camilla was precisely the companion Uncle Dickie had in mind to keep Charles busy until young Amanda came of age.

But by the late autumn of 1972 Charles was starting to appreciate Camilla Shand as rather more than Uncle Dickie’s temporary ‘wild oats’. The prince was coming to feel so at ease in Camilla’s company that he dared to hope she could one day be his lifelong ‘friend and companion to love and to cherish’. And ‘to his delight’ (Jonathan Dimbleby again) she was sending back the message that ‘these feelings were reciprocated’.

Naval duties, however, stood in the way. Charles’s frigate HMS Minerva was due to set sail for the Caribbean early in the new year – and was not going to return until the following autumn. On the weekend of 9–10 December, the prince took Camilla and Mountbatten down to Portsmouth for a guided tour of the vessel, then lunch, and the next weekend he was back at Broadlands with Camilla – ‘the last time,’ he wrote sadly to Mountbatten, ‘I shall see her for eight months’.

Thirty-five years later the prince revealed that weekend in December 1972 as the moment when he first realised for sure that he wanted to marry Camilla – that she was his life’s soulmate. But he did not have the courage to tell her properly or strongly enough.

‘Charles declared his love,’ wrote Gyles Brandreth in 2005, ‘but not his hand. He whispered sweet nothings, but said nothing of substance. He made no commitment and he asked for none.’

Just twenty-four years old in November 1972, Charles felt too young to get involved in the whole complicated process of engagement and marriage as heir to the British throne. In the most banal sense, the prospect would have meant too many practical details to be fitted in before Minerva set sail – starting with an approach to his parents with whom he had not begun to broach his feelings. They would undoubtedly have raised some questions, since their views about Camilla’s suitability were not that different from Uncle Dickie’s. She was a nice horsey woman and excellent girlfriend material – but she was not an obvious future queen, especially since there was no need to hurry. So Charles did not hurry either.

‘Sometimes,’ as Gyles Brandreth shrewdly put it, ‘the actions we do not take are indeed more significant than those we do.’

Camilla herself was not really surprised – nor greatly cast down. For half a dozen years she had been busily engaged in a colourful on-and-off relationship with Captain Andrew Parker Bowles, a handsome and eligible officer in the Household Cavalry, and a highly desirable catch in his own right, both in terms of his personal charm and his own royal connections. In 1953, aged thirteen, Andrew had been a pageboy, dressed in silk and satin, at the Queen’s coronation, and his father Derek, High Sheriff of Berkshire, was a member of the Queen Mother’s horse-racing and social circle.

The on-and-off aspect of their romance reflected Parker Bowles’s foreign assignments – he had served in Germany, Cyprus and Ulster, as well as a spell in New Zealand. But the principal ‘off’ factor was his appalling infidelity. Major ‘Poker’ Bowles, as he was known in the regiment, was irresistible to other women, and he wasted little energy in denying their temptations.

From time to time, Camilla struck back – and this was one explanation of her direct approach to Charles in the spring of 1972. Andrew had been enjoying a fling with the still unmarried Princess Anne in the early months of that year – and it was soon after this that Camilla made her bid for Charles. Her approach to the prince was a lowly matter of tit for tat.

‘She was determined to show [Andrew],’ recalled one of the polo community, ‘that she could do as well in the royal pulling stakes as he had done.’

By early 1973, however, both Andrew and Camilla had disentangled themselves from their royal relationships. They had been dating in their on-off way for nearly seven years, and Camilla’s father was losing patience. The major had been amused by his daughter’s relationship with Charles but, like Camilla herself, he did not believe it could possibly lead to a top-level royal marriage. So this was the moment, with the prince on the other side of the world. According to John Bowes-Lyon (Andrew’s cousin), in March 1973 Camilla’s family decided to force Andrew’s hand by publishing an engagement notice in The Times.

Andrew Parker Bowles allowed himself to be trapped with good grace – the game was up. Aged thirty-three, it was a good time for him to settle down – and Camilla, coming up to twenty-six in July, had had enough of being always a bridesmaid never the bride. So on 4 July that year the Shand and Parker Bowles clans came together in the elegant surroundings of the Guards Chapel at Wellington Barracks with dress uniforms and three senior members of the royal family – Princess Anne, Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother. It was the ‘society wedding of the year’, with eight hundred guests in attendance.

Though Charles had been invited, he sent his regrets on the grounds of ‘duty’, since he was representing his mother in Nassau, where the Bahamas were about to celebrate independence. But no one who knew the story believed him. The prince had locked himself in his cabin on Minerva on first hearing the news of the engagement, writing forlornly in a confidential letter, ‘I suppose the feeling of emptiness will pass eventually.’

It took some time, but his sad feeling did pass – to some degree. By the mid-1970s the prince had begun dating again, enjoying the company of quite a number of eligible young women.

So had Andrew Parker Bowles. The galloping major had not waited that long after his 1973 wedding to resume his skirt-chasing ways, and his wife tolerated his philandering as she had done before their marriage. Enjoying domestic life in the country, Camilla concentrated on the raising of her two children, Tom (b.1974) and Laura (b.1978). She also maintained her friendly contact with Prince Charles, who had agreed to be the godfather of Tom.

Then, in August 1979, Lord Mountbatten was assassinated with members of his family by an IRA bomb on board his fishing boat off the coast of Mullaghmore, County Sligo. Charles was devastated and in his sorrow he turned to Camilla. He regarded her as his best friend – the person, above all, in whom he could totally confide. His former lover remained his ‘touchstone’ and ‘sounding board’, as he put it to Jonathan Dimbleby. From Camilla’s point of view, her once-casual ‘revenge bonk’ over Andrew and Anne had become deeply serious.

Speaking mainly, and at length, on the telephone, Charles poured out his heart to Camilla, and she gave him the solace that only she could provide. In a matter of months their best friendship had turned again into love – certainly in the spiritual sense. There were some who believed that in 1979 and 1980 the pair secretly resumed a clandestine affair, and one or two members of the royal family were so concerned that they warned the prince directly of the damage his persistent ‘illicit liaison’ would do to the reputation of the monarchy. A feeling was growing that Charles, approaching the age of thirty-two, should be getting on with the job of finding himself a future queen – and that very summer of 1980 he was photographed at Balmoral in the company of Lady Diana Spencer.

Still only nineteen years old in September that year when she was caught in fishing mode with Prince Charles on the banks of the River Dee by a Fleet Street lens, Lady Diana Spencer had known the prince for some time already. Her elder sister Sarah had actually dated him for a spell in Silver Jubilee year (1977), while her maternal grandmother Ruth, Lady Fermoy, was a confidante of the Queen Mother and one of her ladies-in-waiting.

The Queen had invited Diana to Balmoral so that she and her husband could take a closer look at the young woman whom insiders were even then tipping as her future daughter-in-law. In the 1960s Diana had been one of the children who came to play with Andrew and Edward at Sandringham – happening to fall between the two younger brothers in age, and joining them to watch Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on the comfy sofas of the house’s ‘cinema’. Notably demure and polite in those days, how had the girl developed?

Diana passed the test with flying colours.

‘We went stalking together,’ remembered fellow guest Patti Palmer-Tomkinson. ‘We got hot, we got tired, she fell into a bog, she got covered in mud, laughed her head off, got puce in the face, her hair glued to her forehead because it was pouring with rain … She was a sort of wonderful English schoolgirl who was game for anything.’

Both the Queen and Prince Philip eyed Diana approvingly. Edward and Andrew competed to sit beside her at evening picnics, and the whole family liked her. Just a year after the death of his beloved honorary grandfather, Charles felt he had finally located ‘the sweet-charactered girl’ for whom Uncle Dickie had urged him to search – and the British press felt the same. Media around the entire world went so ‘Di-crazy’, in fact, that Charles’s father became alarmed. As the press coverage intensified, Prince Philip told his son in a blunt intervention that Charles must either propose to the girl or walk away ‘immediately’ for the sake of her good name.

‘Whichever choice he decided to make,’ Charles later recalled his father counselling, ‘he should not delay.’

That is how marriages get ‘arranged’ in the age of mass media scrutiny. Charles bowed to his father’s ‘advice’ and proposed to Diana at the beginning of February 1981. The couple announced their engagement at the end of the month, and Britain became even more hysterical in the weeks leading up to their spectacular union on 29 July. Over six hundred thousand people packed the pavements to cheer the couple to and from the wedding in St Paul’s Cathedral, in front of an invited congregation of 3,500 and an estimated 750 million global viewers – then the largest TV audience in history.

The bride’s intricate ivory taffeta gown was paired with a lace veil no less than 153 yards long, together with an eighteenth-century heirloom tiara, while her silk bridal slippers were embroidered with 542 sequins and 132 matching pearls – the heels kept deliberately low so as not to upstage the groom: at five foot ten, Diana was exactly the same height as Charles.

When it came to the couple’s wedding vows, Diana was the first bride in royal history to promise to love, honour and cherish her husband but not necessarily to ‘obey’.

4
Agape

‘Put the needs of others above your own fears.’

(Meghan Markle, Graduation Speech at Immaculate Heart School, 3 June 2020)

On 4 August 1981, less than a week – just six days – after the wedding of Charles and Diana in London, Rachel Meghan Markle was born in Canoga Park, Los Angeles. Most of the sixty thousand inhabitants of this leafy suburb in the San Fernando Valley had access to a television that ‘royal summer’, and those who were watching on 29 July would have had little choice about their viewing. The Royal Wedding from London was carried all day long by every US network.

If they had been among the millions watching the London wedding in the week before their baby’s birth, Meghan’s parents Tom and Doria Markle could hardly have failed to notice the difference between the classical dome of St Paul’s Cathedral and the gold orb-topped turrets of the Self-Realization Fellowship Temple on Sunset Boulevard where they had married eighteen months earlier. With its strikingly exotic Moorish entrance arch and plastic Buddhas, the Self-Realization Fellowship Temple stood out in the middle of LA’s red-light district – it was just a stone’s throw from where Hugh Grant would be caught in his car enjoying oral sex with prostitute Divine Brown in June 1995.

‘A fresh new day … and it is ours,’ read the opening line of the Markles’ wedding invitation, with the promise of ‘happy beginnings …’

Their ceremony of union had been presided over by Brother Bhaktananda, an ordained Buddhist priest in glowing orange robes who had been born Michael Krull in Pennsylvania. Founded in 1920 by Indian yogi Paramahansa Yogananda, the Fellowship Temple preached a gospel of ‘spirituality and self-knowledge through meditation and Kriya yoga’ and had been the choice of Doria, twenty-three years old at the time of her marriage to the thirty-five-year-old Thomas. According to her half-brother Joseph Johnson – Meghan’s uncle – Doria ‘was fascinated by alternative religions and yoga’.

Joseph would give Doria the credit for instilling in his niece Meghan her expansive self-confidence, along with the buoyant belief she developed early in her childhood that ‘she could be anything and achieve anything’. Joseph traced this back to the profusion of striking female role models in the family – ‘culturally our family did not have male figures around’ – and especially to Doria’s mother Jeanette, Meghan’s grandmother, who was the daughter of a Cleveland bellhop and lift operator in a ‘fancy whites-only hotel’.

Joseph recalled the searing experience of crossing America as a child with his half-sister in the days of segregation. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1956, Doria had been just a baby when her mother packed her up to head west. Arriving one night in a small ‘all white’ town in the middle of Texas, they were cold and hungry, but no one would rent a room to them as non-whites.

‘We wanted food and shelter, but we were turned away because of the colour of our skin.’ It was the first time that Uncle Joseph, then seven years old, had experienced racism.

‘I was young,’ he recalls, ‘but I remember one guy pointing off into the snow saying, “The highway is that way. Get going! You are not welcome here.”’

Life got better in Los Angeles, where Doria was bussed with other black pupils under the recently passed desegregation laws to Fairfax High, a mostly white Jewish school.

‘We were raised together,’ Uncle Joseph recounted to the Mail on Sunday’s Caroline Graham. ‘There was an age difference [seven years] with Doria. She was the youngest. But, like Meghan, she’s whip-smart and always wanted more out of life.’

Priding herself on her hair, Doria grew ‘a big beautiful Afro’ and started work as a trainee make-up artist on the daytime TV show General Hospital – which was where, in her early twenties, she met Thomas Markle, twelve years her senior, recently divorced and working on the soap opera as the lighting director. The attraction was instant. On the highly successful long-running show nurses and doctors would engage in ‘lusty’ love affairs while performing heroic heart transplants. Tom and Doria couldn’t match the medical heroics, but their love affair proved both powerful and immediate, and they wasted no time in getting married.

Thomas had arrived from the east coast where he had grown up in the small town of Newport, Pennsylvania, as the youngest of three sons in a talented Anglo-German family – known as ‘Merckel’ before they anglicised the name. One of his brothers joined the US air force and was later an international diplomat, while the other became a bishop in the small Eastern Orthodox Catholic Church in America – its motto ‘God became human in order that human beings might become gods’.

Leaving school in his teens, the young and artistic Thomas had moved to the nearby Pocono Mountains, where he found backstage work in playhouses catering to the tourist trade – before relocating to Chicago. In the Windy City he married for the first time, fathering two children, and became a lighting director.

The equivalent of the director of photography in movies or television, a lighting director inspired and set the ‘mood’ or look of any scene, and Tom Markle had a light touch. Although physically heavy-set, he was creatively twinkle-toed, taking his inspiration from the Busby Berkeley movies he had loved to watch as a child with their extravagantly illuminated parades of elegantly clad dancers.

In later years, and certainly at the time of her marriage to Prince Harry, Thomas Markle would come to play the villain in Meghan’s life, taking money for clunky press interviews in which he was outspoken in his criticism of his daughter. Eventually, and notoriously, he would fail to feature at her wedding to Harry. But as a young father by all accounts – including Meghan’s own – Thomas’s creativity and commitment were a parental inspiration.

‘It’s safe to say,’ Meghan stated at the time of her engagement, ‘I have always been a “Daddy’s Girl”.’

One Christmas Tom tackled the central question of his daughter’s mixed-race identity by purchasing two sets of Barbie dolls – one black and one white. He took them apart and re-mixed them to create her own customised personal set – ‘a black mom doll, a white dad doll and a child in each colour’. When Meghan went to school and found herself confronted by a tick-box form to complete about her ethnicity and realised that she did not fit in to just one category, ‘my dad said words that will stay with me forever: “Draw your own box.”’

Thanks to Tom Markle’s earning power – swollen by a $750,000 win in the California State Lottery in 1990 – Meghan’s upbringing was not as deprived as some have imagined. Canoga Park where she spent much of her childhood is a respectable blue-collar and middle-class suburb of Los Angeles – not fancy, perhaps, but cheerfully green and racially mixed.

When Meghan was six, Doria and Tom separated and divorced, and she went to live with Doria. But Tom remained a hands-on father. ‘He taught me how to fish,’ recalled Meghan, ‘to appreciate Busby Berkeley films, write thank you notes and spend my weekends in Little Tokyo eating chicken teriyaki with vegetable tempura.’

It was her father’s care and belief, she later said, that inspired her ‘grand dream’ of becoming an actress – and in a very practical sense. With Doria working – at jobs as a travel agent, a clothing designer and later a social worker – Tom would be the one to pick Meghan up from school and take her to work with him.

Her assurance and her familiarity with show business would come from nearly a decade of doing her homework on the sets of the sitcom Married … with Children and General Hospital – on which her father was the lighting supremo. In 1982, the year after Meghan’s birth, Tom Markle had won a Daytime Emmy Award for his lighting direction of General Hospital and four years later he had been nominated for an award for his lighting work helping to stage the 58th Academy Awards – the Oscars.

Meghan was not obviously thrown off course by her parents’ separation and divorce in 1987. If anything, it increased her self-reliance. Early in 1991, aged only nine, she was filmed by a local news channel holding up an anti-war protest sign in a demonstration against the first Gulf War that she herself had organised in the school playground. A boy in her class had burst into tears because his elder brother was heading out to fight against Iraq, and the boy thought he was going to die. So Meghan drew a sign saying ‘Peace and Harmony for the World’ and gathered her classmates into the protest.

‘She was one of those children,’ said her teacher Ilise Faye, ‘that would stand up for the underdogs. She would stand up for what she believed in, and she was a leader among her friends, her peer group.’

A year or so later, Meghan went a stage further with her political and social campaigning. She was watching a TV show in school when a commercial came on for Ivory Clear dishwashing liquid, showing a sink full of dirty dishes, with the tagline ‘Women all over America are fighting greasy pots and pans.’ Two boys in the class piped up, ‘Yeah, that’s where women belong – in the kitchen!’

‘I remember feeling shocked and angry,’ Meghan said, ‘and also just feeling so hurt … Something needed to be done. So I went home and told my dad what had happened, and he encouraged me to write letters. So I did – to the most powerful people I could think of.’

Starting at the top, the eleven-year-old wrote to the First Lady, Hillary Clinton; to Linda Ellerbee, the host of Nick News, her favourite kids’ TV news programme; to the noted women’s rights lawyer Gloria Allred; and to Ivory Clear’s manufacturer, Procter & Gamble.

Procter & Gamble never replied. But Hillary Clinton and Gloria Allred did. Both sent letters of encouragement, and Linda Ellerbee sent a camera crew to interview the young campaigner. A month later Procter & Gamble changed its tagline. ‘Women all over America’ became ‘People all over America’, and its TV copy lines have tried to remain gender neutral ever since.

The Immaculate Heart School that Meghan attended from the age of eleven to seventeen might not have been ritzy, but it was an esteemed and fee-paying all-girls Catholic establishment that was known for producing hard-working, polite and civic-minded young women. About a third of its students were white, 20 per cent were Latina, 17 per cent were mixed-race like Meghan, 17 per cent were Asian and Pacific Islander, and 5 per cent or so were black. Former pupils included actresses Tyra Banks and Mary Tyler Moore, yet though the campus was sited below the hilltop lettering of the famous Hollywood sign, the religious – and even austere – academy was not celebrity-inclined.

Virtually all of Immaculate Heart’s students went on to high-quality colleges, and many went to Harvard, Princeton or Stanford. But the teaching sisters were proudest of the number of pupils who volunteered for their out-of-school charity projects – among them a soup kitchen on Skid Row for which they equipped girls with the slogan, ‘Put the needs of others above your own fears.’

Through these secondary school years Meghan stayed pretty much full-time at the home of her father, since Thomas lived within walking distance of Immaculate Heart. He would help with the lighting and stage sets of the school productions in which his daughter performed – including the musicals Into the Woods and Annie, in the latter of which Meghan sang her own solo number.

‘I remember her being very excited and nervous about her song,’ recalls Gigi Perreau, a former child actress who taught Meghan drama at Immaculate Heart for four years. ‘She was very active in my drama department. We never had a moment’s problem with her. She was spot on, learnt her lines when she had to – very dedicated, very focused.’

Immaculate Heart had a fondness for ancient Greek words with a religious connotation – ‘kairos’, for example, meaning ‘the time when God acts’, was the title given to school spiritual sessions, in which Meghan participated as a group leader. Another was ‘arche’, the term Aristotle had coined to express the ‘origin’ or ‘first cause’ of all things (as in the term ‘archetype’); and then there was ‘agape’, meaning charity or the highest form of unconditional love – ‘the love of God for man and of man for God’.

According to Aristotle, there is regular love and then there is agape. During her summer vacations Meghan would take part in retreats organised by the Agape International Spiritual Center: ‘We are on the planet,’ ran Agape’s manifesto, ‘to be and express the Divine Love of God that is alive in every fiber of our being, waiting to be released through us onto our world. Living as love is a way of life that brings heaven on earth.’

Founded in 1986 in Los Angeles by Dr Michael Bernard Beckwith, Agape described itself as a ‘trans-denominational’ community that embraced Christianity without excluding other religions, teaching that Jesus, like Gandhi or Buddha, was not so much ‘the great exception’ as ‘the great example’. Oprah Winfrey, Stevie Wonder and Van Morrison were among the celebrities to endorse Dr Beckwith’s spiritual process that unlocked, as Oprah put it, ‘everything that is unique, mighty and magnificent inside each of us’.

Agape’s morning schedule at its summer camps started soon after dawn with meditation and teaching at 6.45, helping to set a pattern of early rising (and, later, early morning texting and emailing) that Meghan would maintain into her professional life. Aged thirteen, she enjoyed her first kiss at an Agape summer camp held at Santa Monica – with the future comedian Joshua Silverstein who, also thirteen that year, would recall it happening at the end of a drama workshop.

‘We were kind of leaving and walking out,’ Silverstein remembered in the spring of 2018 – he was by then a thirty-six-year-old married father of two, starring with James Corden on The Late Late Show. ‘I noticed her making a beeline toward me with a lot of intention.’

The teenage couple had already met and bonded over their mixed-race heritage.

‘She was charming and quirky,’ said Silverstein. ‘She wasn’t a stereotypical thirteen-year-old girl … decked out in pink every day … flaunting make-up or anything. She was her own person, very authentic to who she was at the time … serious about her craft. I found out from our friends that she liked me and I liked her, and I just think that we decided it would be a good idea to become boyfriend and girlfriend.’

The pair had held hands previously and hugged, but now there was something different in Meghan’s manner that caught Silverstein off guard.

‘She kissed me. She made the move,’ he recalled. ‘And I think I was like, OK – we’re at that phase of our relationship right now, we’re kissing … But the kiss was definitely her – her initiative absolutely.’

Meghan confirmed Silverstein’s memory in an interview she gave to talk show host Larry King: ‘I was thirteen, it was a summer camp and I kissed him.’

According to Silverstein, he and Meghan continued their relationship for the rest of the Agape camp – with more kisses – then mutually decided to split up at the end of the summer. They discussed the matter dispassionately. Neither of them wanted to put a ‘dampener’ on what might happen when they got back to school – they wanted to be free to date other people – a couple of extremely mature thirteen-year-olds.

Agape has remained an important part of Meghan Markle’s life. She would even become an Agape youth minister for a period and her mother Doria still attends Agape services on Sunset Boulevard. To the end of Meghan’s school years and onwards through college at Northwestern University, Illinois, where she joined Kappa Kappa Gamma Sorority and participated in community and charity projects, she would rise early every day to meditate and repeat an Agape morning mantra – as she is thought to do to this day.

‘God is on my side’, runs one such mantra. ‘God is coming into being through me. God wants me to be all I can be. God wants to come into its own through me’ – the point of the word ‘its’ being that, for Agape, God is not so sexist as to be either male or female.

So here was the dedicated and definitely un-Windsor bombshell – the Agape kisser – who would be waiting for Prince Harry after all his trials and travails that we shall be reading about in the pages ahead.

5
‘Whatever “in love” Means’

‘Jealousy, total jealousy … I felt I was a lamb to the slaughter.’

(Princess Diana, recording her thoughts for author Andrew Morton in 1991)

When Elton John and his lyricist Bernie Taupin wanted to sum up the tragic legend of Diana, Princess of Wales, dead in August 1997 at the age of only thirty-six, they turned to the anthem they had composed twenty-four years earlier in tribute to another troubled heroine who had died at the very same age: Marilyn Monroe.

‘ Goodbye Norma Jean, Though I never knew you at all …’

Within hours of Diana’s death, radio stations had started to play the original ‘Candle in the Wind’, catching the metaphor of the flickering, sensitive superstar destroyed by too much publicity and by her inability to find a partner who could sustain her difficult nature with solid emotional support and understanding – ‘Never knowing who to cling to when the rain set in.’

Quickly rewritten to be sung in Westminster Abbey just six days after her death, the Diana version of ‘Candle’ avoided those tricky targets in favour of safer praise:

You called out to our country and you whispered to those in pain,

Now you belong to heaven and the stars spell out your name.

When Charles, Prince of Wales, aged thirty-two, made his momentous proposal of marriage to the still-teenage Diana, nineteen, on 3 February 1981, he had just come back from a skiing holiday.

‘I’ve missed you so much,’ he told her as they sat together in the nursery at Windsor – and then he simply dived in.

‘Will you marry me?’ he asked.

Diana laughed and later remembered thinking, This is a joke.

But the prince was deadly serious – ‘You do realise,’ he said sternly, ‘that one day you will be Queen’, reproving the teenager for her hilarity.

Diana got the point immediately.

You won’t be Queen, she told herself, according to her subsequent account – but that was not what she said at the time to her future husband.

‘I love you so much,’ she declared, trying to shift the mood in a happier direction. ‘I love you so much.’

Charles’s response came back as a shrug of the shoulders and three historic words: ‘Whatever “love” means.’

The prince was so pleased with his exercise in home-baked philosophy that he repeated it publicly three weeks later when the couple announced their engagement on 24 February. On this occasion the interviewer had served up a flaccid final question about how the couple were feeling: ‘And, I suppose, in love?’ To which Diana replied at once, ‘Of course’, leaving Charles to lift his eyebrows again: ‘Whatever “in love” means.’

Friends pointed out later that he had been engaged in a serious exercise – taking issue with popular clichés about being ‘in love’. But whatever Charles meant on television, that had not been the issue when Diana had first told him that she loved him ‘so much’. Following her acceptance, the prince had gone straight upstairs to phone his mother with the crucial news the Queen had been waiting for.

‘His choice of marrying Diana was really motivated by his parents pushing him to get the succession assured,’ recalls a friend. ‘He once actually said as much to me at a dinner with Elizabeth of Yugoslavia. He intimated that he was being pushed and pushed towards marriage.’

Prince Charles’s proposal to Diana, in other words, had not been about his feelings or emotions, which were by then committed to another woman. It had been essentially a business proposition.

A few days into their honeymoon on the Royal Yacht Britannia, they opened their diaries to discuss their next engagements, when out of Charles’s dropped not one, but two photos of Camilla.

Diana chose not to spoil the moment. She had already worked out the truth about Mrs Parker Bowles from a pre-wedding lunch à deux that Camilla herself had proposed to celebrate the engagement and to ‘look at the ring’ – an oddly proprietorial suggestion to make. Camilla had posed one strangely repeated question about whether Diana was planning to join her husband with the Beaufort Hunt – and Diana, no great horsewoman, deduced that hunting was an activity in which Mrs PB was hoping to keep the prince to herself.

‘Whatever happens, I will always love you,’ Diana overheard Charles proclaiming urgently one evening on his hand-held telephone in his bath. Then her husband told her how he needed to find a country house that tied up with his work for the Duchy of Cornwall – and chose Highgrove House in Gloucestershire. Highgrove was over 190 miles from Cornwall, but less than half an hour’s drive from Bolehyde Manor, the Parker Bowles’s home near Chippenham – and it was smack in the middle of Beaufort Hunt country.

Getting ready while on honeymoon in Egypt for a white-tie dinner with President Anwar Sadat, Diana noticed that her husband’s cufflinks were engraved with two intertwined letter Cs.

‘Camilla gave you those, didn’t she?’

‘Yes,’ replied Charles defensively. ‘So what’s wrong? They’re a present from a friend.’

‘Boy, did we have a row,’ recalled Diana later, talking to the author Andrew Morton. ‘Jealousy, total jealousy … I felt I was a lamb to the slaughter.’

Things got worse when the couple left Britannia to round off their honeymoon in Balmoral that September. Charles would take Diana for long walks around the Highlands, finding a hilltop where he could settle her down and read philosophy to her – Carl Gustav Jung, or the writings of his friend, the guru and conservationist Laurens van der Post. Two months into their marriage, she assumed that her husband was ringing up his mistress every five minutes the moment he got back to his room at the house, asking her advice on how to handle his difficult bride.

The emotional strain intensified Diana’s bulimia nervosa, the eating disorder that had struck her, according to the princess, just a week after the couple had got engaged.

‘A bit chubby here, aren’t we?’ Charles had said, putting his hand accusingly on his fiancée’s waistline. ‘And that triggered off something in me – and the Camilla thing. I was desperate, desperate.’

She remembered the first time she made herself sick. The vomiting released the tension she had been feeling, and she felt ‘thrilled’ – but it proved to be the beginning of a lethal pattern in which Diana would find herself vomiting every day. When first measured for her wedding dress in February 1981, Diana had been 29 inches around the waist; on her July wedding day, she was down to 23½ inches. On top of this, she had found herself dreaming about Camilla.

Charles invited Laurens van der Post himself up to Balmoral for some personal counselling to help his wife – with no success.

‘Laurens didn’t understand me,’ Diana said. ‘Everybody saw I was getting thinner and thinner and I was being sicker and sicker. Basically they thought I could adapt to being Princess of Wales overnight. Anyway, a godsend – William was conceived in October. Marvellous news, occupied my mind.’

Diana’s pregnancy with William prompted scarcely an improvement in her condition, however, for now the princess began suffering from both bulimia and morning sickness. Concerned about the health of the baby growing inside her, she refused to take her bulimia pills – with graphic consequences: ‘Sick, sick, sick, sick, sick,’ she related to Andrew Morton in the book that, ten years later when it was published, would blow the lid off the myth of the ‘dream’ royal marriage.

1976: ‘Dear Roddy …’ Elizabeth II writes to Princess Margaret’s boyfriend Roddy Llewellyn

In 1981, the lid was already off so far as the royal family was concerned. They had witnessed Diana’s weeping and fits – and their sympathies were all with Charles.

‘So I was “a problem” and they registered Diana as “a problem”,’ the princess told Morton. ‘Poor Charles is having such a hard time.’

The Queen saw Diana’s vomiting as a cause, not a symptom, of the marriage issues – but she did show sympathy when it came to her daughter-in-law’s troubles with the press. Diana suffered something close to a nervous breakdown that December when she went out from Highgrove to buy some wine gums in the local village shop – only to find herself surrounded by the ever-developing pack of newspaper photographers and reporters. The princess broke down in tears.

For the first time in her reign, Elizabeth II summoned the editors of all Britain’s national, daily and Sunday newspapers to Buckingham Palace, along with the principal news directors at the BBC and ITN. Never had there been a British media gathering like it. The Queen’s press secretary Michael Shea received the Fleet Street grandees in the palace’s magnificent white and gold 1844 Room, explaining how the princess was ‘more than usually affected by morning sickness because of her age and build’ and how the Queen was taking a personal interest in her privacy. Pleasantly suggesting that more restraint might be in order, Shea invited the editors for drinks next door in the still more magnificent Caernarvon Room decorated with paintings of Britain’s triumphs against Napoleon.

Hardly had the editors taken their first sips of champagne, when the Queen herself walked in escorted by her younger son Prince Andrew, who was just then approaching the height of his popularity as a naval helicopter pilot. The intrepid hacks were so overwhelmed by the royal presence that they simply exchanged humble banalities with their sovereign like any citizen would – until the editor of the News of the World, Barry Askew, also known as the Beast of Bouverie Street, finally dared to address the issue that had brought them all together.

‘If Lady Di wants to buy some wine gums without being photographed,’ he said, ‘why doesn’t she send a servant?’

‘What an extremely pompous man you are!’ replied Her Majesty with a gracious smile – and the hearty laughs around the room made clear who was considered the winner of that exchange. A month later Askew was sacked from the News of the World by his proprietor Rupert Murdoch – though it was not explained whether that was for making such a public fool of himself or because he had compromised his paper’s independence by attending the meeting.

The palace gathering had identified the new dimension – and the new challenges – that Diana’s glamour had brought to the royal family, and, sadly, it did not resolve them. Three months later, in February 1982, Charles and Diana flew to the Bahamas for a pre-baby holiday, staying at Windermere on the island of Eleuthera, the secluded home of Lord Mountbatten’s daughter and son-in-law, Patricia and John Brabourne.

In this romantic setting, far from civilisation – and from Camilla – the royal couple sunbathed and swam together, splashing and kissing in the surf with their arms around one another. They grilled each other barbecue suppers – but they were not alone. Before dawn one morning, kitted out in full tropical gear, binoculars and a huge, long-distance telephoto lens, Daily Star reporter James Whitaker and his photographer accomplice Ken Lennox crawled through the darkness across a spit of land opposite the Brabourne beach. Lying patiently in wait as the sun rose, the spies were finally rewarded by the extraordinary sight of a bikini-clad Diana splashing into the sea with her five-month-pregnant belly clearly visible – and obviously imagining that she was quite alone. The revealing photos covered the front page of the Star next morning.

In vain did the Queen condemn the invasion of her daughter-in-law’s privacy as ‘tasteless behaviour’ that was ‘in breach of normally accepted British press standards’. The Press Council tut-tutted – and James Whitaker proudly claimed the coup as the high spot of his career.

‘I’ve never done anything more brilliantly intrusive,’ the reporter boasted. ‘We’d crawled and waited for hours. It was one of the triumphs of my professional life.’

‘Brilliantly’ intrusive? A triumph? What profession? What life?

These are running themes to ponder as we leave Princess Diana for the moment, exposed on the front page with the unborn Prince William inside her. Before June 1982 when he enters our story, we have another character to meet, born five months ahead of William: Ms Catherine Middleton, and her family, who would, in due course, be joining the royal family.

6
Party Pieces

‘Une nation de boutiquiers.’ – ‘A nation of shopkeepers.’

(Insult directed against the British, attributed to Napoleon, 1822)

So that’s enough for the moment from those wacky Windsors – not to mention the manic Markles on the other side of the Atlantic …

Let us turn our attention instead to those charmingly civilised, middle-of-the-road, middle-class, middle-England Middletons who have risen so high, but also oh-so-modestly, from their salt-of-the-earth coal-mining origins, with no history of nasty plottings or family back-stabbings – no messy divorces, no scheming ambition …

Well, up to a point, Lord Copper …

Lord Copper was Evelyn Waugh’s brilliantly fearsome amalgamation of the overbearing 1930s press lords Northcliffe and Beaverbrook, ruling imperiously over his imaginary tabloid rag The Daily Beast* in Scoop, Waugh’s 1938 novel of Fleet Street skulduggery. Lord Copper’s editors were so scared of their boss that they never dared say no to his face, only disagreeing with him ‘up to a point …’

So let us not dare to doubt the perfection of the sainted Middletons – well, up to a point, dear reader – as they now enter our story with the birth of their daughter Catherine Elizabeth on 9 January 1982, five months before the birth of her future husband Prince William. It is interesting to note that the brides of both our royal heroes are older than their husbands – and how the histories of their royal recruitment present such instructive studies in social climbing. The Queen Catherines of England certainly form a society that is well worth climbing into: Catherine of Valois, Catherine of Aragon, Catherine Howard, Catherine Parr, Catherine of Braganza – Catherine Middleton …

Let us start with the coal-mining. Kate Middleton’s great-great-grandfather on her mother’s side, John Harrison, came from Hetton-le-Hole in County Durham. Today Hetton is effectively a suburb of Sunderland, but it was a mining village in its own right in 1896, when John, aged twenty-two, married domestic servant Jane Hill, by whom he would father nine children, including Kate’s great-grandfather, Thomas. For some twenty years John went down the pit every working day, until he was trampled in a freak accident by a runaway pit pony. After being laid out flat on his back for months, Great-great-grandpa was compelled to take early retirement, and for the rest of his life he could walk only with the help of a stick.

Great-grandfather Thomas, known to the family as ‘Tommy’, was too canny to follow his father down the pit. He trained as a joiner and in the 1930s headed south to London with his wife Elizabeth, settling in the western railway depot suburb of Southall, where his carpentry earned them enough to buy a two-bedroomed terraced house facing the Grand Union Canal. There Tommy and Elizabeth raised Kate’s grandmother Dorothy, who left school early to work on the high street as a shop assistant at a branch of the Dorothy Perkins fashion chain – and was known to family and friends as ‘Lady Dorothy’.

Strong and aspirational women play an important role in the history of Kate Middleton’s family – starting with her great-grandmother Edith Goldsmith who smoked twenty Woodbines a day, brought up six children and, when widowed, went to work in the local jam factory. In 1953, just two months after Elizabeth II’s coronation, Edith’s twenty-two-year-old son Ron, a builder, who had left school at fourteen, married Lady Dorothy, then just eighteen.

Ron and Dorothy – Kate’s grandparents – settled in a council flat in Southall, and 1955 saw the birth of their daughter Carole, Kate’s mother. Delighted with her new baby, Lady Dorothy bought little Carole – in the words of one spiteful relative – ‘the biggest Silver Cross pram you have ever seen’.

In 2020, a Silver Cross Balmoral pram, complete with huge curved springs and wire-spoked wheels, will set you back £1,800 – and if that is a little too rich for your pocket, you can slum it with the lesser Kensington model at just £1,500. These prices come from John Lewis – to this day the Middletons’ favourite store, motto: ‘Never Knowingly Undersold’.

‘We all thought Dorothy was a bit of a snob,’ recalled Ron’s niece, Ann Terry, who worked beside her in a jewellery store. ‘She always wanted to better herself.’

Living upstairs in their cramped and unheated Southall flat that lay under the Heathrow flightpath, the Goldsmiths had to manhandle their Silver Cross perambulator up and down the staircase every time baby Carole needed some air.

‘My grandmother used to grumble about Dorothy,’ remembered another relative, ‘because she thought she henpecked her Ronald. She thought Dorothy always wanted more and more money. She wanted to be the top brick in the chimney.’

After a dozen years of marriage, Dorothy and Ron were finally able to move out of the council flat to their first proper house – in Kingsbridge Road, Norwood Green, near Ealing, at the smarter end of Southall. By now Carole was about to enter her teens, but she only attended the local state school and then left when she was sixteen, since Ron could not afford to send her to teacher training college. Carole went straight out to work for ‘the Pru’ – the Prudential Insurance Company in Holborn.

The Pru and Carole Goldsmith did not get along. She had never seen herself working in an office, so she asked her father to stake her for two more years at school to get her A-levels – economics, English literature, geography and art. These helped her to win a place on the coveted retail trainee scheme of where else but John Lewis, learning her shopkeeping in the china and glass department at the Peter Jones branch on Sloane Square, Chelsea. Carole was loving the idea of a career in merchandising, until she was instructed to knuckle down for a full six months as a sales assistant on the shopfloor.

‘Blow that!’ she said in 2018 in an interview with the Telegraph. ‘I’m not doing that for six months – it was really boring.’

No office and no shopfloor for Carole Goldsmith! Still aged only eighteen in 1973, she used her Pitman shorthand to get a job at BEA – British European Airways, just merging with British Overseas Airways Corporation to become the modern British Airways – and she also brushed up her schoolgirl French to secure a position with the ground staff. There she met the handsome and genial Michael Middleton, somewhat less forceful than her, but working in a quietly responsible job as a flight dispatcher, sharing with the pilot legal responsibility for passenger safety of the flights he supervised. The couple soon fell in love – and Lady Dorothy thoroughly approved.

Michael Middleton was exactly the sort of husband that Carole’s mother had hoped her daughter would snag – charming, good-looking and rolling in class, plus a bit of money. The Middletons could trace their descent to Tudor times, while their money went back to Yorkshire wool production during the Industrial Revolution. Shrewdly invested through a variety of trusts, the inheritance had cushioned the family for generations. Michael had been privately educated at Clifton College, Bristol’s top public school, before moving to British Airways in hopes of becoming a pilot. Grounded by poor eyesight, he had switched to ground-crew work, where he met Carole.

When the couple married in 1980 it was Middleton money that bought their first home, a Victorian semi-detached cottage in a village near Bucklebury in Berkshire – whence they moved after three years with their baby daughters Catherine and Pippa to Amman in Jordan, where Michael had been transferred. As an expat mum there was not much for Carole to do in Amman except to stage and attend parties – and this may have helped to inspire what came next. On their return to the UK in 1987, Carole, by now thirty-two, was pregnant with their third child James.

Oooh, she recalled thinking. Bills to pay!

Within months of James’s birth she had created her own trading company, Party Pieces.

It was a simple idea – a one-stop, mail-order destination from which you could order anything you needed for a children’s party. Fancy dress, candles, going-home party bags, balloons, a dinosaur table piece – Carole could source it all. She went to the Spring Fair at Birmingham in 1987, hooked up with some suppliers of paper plates and cups, stuck up a self-designed flyer at Catherine’s playgroup in Bucklebury – and began stuffing colourful party bags on her kitchen table.

There were lots of trips to the local post office in the months that followed, and business was slow to start with. These were pre-Internet days. But then Carole had the idea of advertising with a children’s book club she had subscribed to. She paid to send out ten thousand flyers, then later a hundred thousand – and orders took off. She soon had to transfer from the kitchen table to the garden shed – and then to an office space in nearby Yattendon, where her husband built the packing benches. After a year or so Mike left his job at British Airways in order to help grow the business.

‘We were pretty much the only ones doing this sort of thing when we started,’ Carole told the Telegraph in a 2018 article celebrating thirty years of successful trading. ‘It was really clear almost from the start that this was going to work … Running a business is really very simple: you buy things and sell them for a profit.’

Moderate as always, the Middletons never took major risks. Happy to bide their time, they funded their growth from revenue – and they never allowed commerce to get in the way of their parenting.

‘It was my business,’ recalled Carole, ‘so I could work around the holiday … Mike and I often talked about work in the evenings or on holiday, but we enjoyed it. I never really felt I was a working mother, although I was – and the children didn’t either. They grew up with it.’

Catherine, Pippa and James were involved from the start, often modelling for the increasingly elaborate brochures that their parents were sending out. Catherine/Kate was on the cover of one of the early Party Pieces catalogues, blowing out the candles – an image that will surely be much reproduced when she becomes Queen Catherine. As Kate grew older she styled pictures and helped to develop the business, showing a head for negotiation to match that of her mother.

‘Catherine had all the makings of a fantastic trader,’ says a business person who has dealt with Party Pieces and seen her operate at first hand. ‘Everybody thinks of her now as a mother and future queen – whatever that means. But she’s got a shrewd eye for profit and a very hard head on her shoulders. After university she worked with Party Pieces, and I am quite sure she would have taken the business into a new dimension if she had stayed – very much in her mother’s style.’

Carole Middleton’s haggling skills are legendary in the direct mail business. The family who developed today’s successful Party Pieces empire are not quite the gypsy pedlars depicted in Channel 4’s satirical TV series The Windsors, but the clan are certainly neither noble nor royal. They are a tribe of Internet stallholders at the end of the day – with a keen nose for profit.

‘Carole ran a very strong business and she ran it very well,’ says one of her suppliers. ‘But you did not want to get on the wrong side of her when it came to the pennies. Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth most of the time, but she was a ferocious negotiator – and if the haggling wasn’t going her way, then the decibel level rose. I remember her almost screaming down the phone on one occasion when I refused to drop my price on something. People could hear her on the other side of the office – and that was in my office with her voice coming through the phone from Bucklebury, or wherever.’

Taxed on her negotiating style, Carole has ruefully acknowledged that her nickname with some is ‘Hurricane’ – but she undoubtedly got results. Within a few years Party Pieces was turning a handsome profit.

‘No one seems to have picked up on the fact that both my sister and I were millionaires before we turned thirty,’ said her younger brother, and only sibling, Gary, himself the developer of a successful UK IT recruitment enterprise. ‘She with her Party Pieces business, and me with my company.’

In fact, Carole Middleton was already thirty-two when she founded Party Pieces, but she was clearly generating a healthy cash flow by her mid-thirties. Set up as a private partnership, with related family trusts, Party Pieces has never released figures, so it is impossible to say when the family attained the millionaire status that they enjoyed by the time Kate found herself at St Andrews University with Prince William in the early 2000s. Since Kate became royal in 2011, financial analysts have had a field day probing the family company’s value – placing a £40 million estimate on the enterprise for 2020.

In August 2000 Carole is said to have forcefully negotiated the key decision that transformed her daughter’s destiny – and, indeed, the life of all the Middletons. On the seventeenth of the month, Kate’s A-level results arrived in the post – two As and a B – precisely the grades that she needed to secure her place at her first-choice university, Edinburgh, where she and two of her best friends from Marlborough College, Alice and Emilia, had long planned to study. The three girls had already travelled up to Edinburgh together to set up their lodgings.

Out in Belize, where he was on military exercise with the Welsh Guards, Prince William received similarly welcome news – he had achieved the A, B and C grades that he needed to secure his place at the University of St Andrews to study history of art the following year, and the details of his results and university destination were made public.

It was the first time the world knew that the prince was planning to study at this pleasant Scottish seaside town between Edinburgh and Dundee, starting at its highly rated, Oxbridge-level university in 2001 – and Kate promptly changed her mind about her own degree arrangements. She told Alice and Emilia that she would not be joining them in Edinburgh after all. She had decided to switch to St Andrews to study history of art, like William – and she would also take a gap year so that, if she did get a place, she would go up at the same time, and join the very same course, as the prince.

‘If’ was the operative word. The moment the news of William’s intentions became public, applications to St Andrews rocketed by 44 per cent – with many of the new applicants being female and from America.

But Kate persevered. Sometime at the end of August or the beginning of September 2000, she wrote formally to Edinburgh turning down her place through the UCAS clearing system – Marlborough had insisted she write to the university to apologise – then made a new application to join the history of art course the following year at St Andrews, all with the help of her Marlborough advisors.

‘After she left school,’ recalled her housemistress, Ann Patching, ‘Catherine made some different decisions. But why she made those decisions, I don’t know.’

A few years later the well-connected society journalist Matthew Bell presented his interpretation of Kate’s life-changing switch, based on a ‘reliable’ inside source who, according to Bell, ‘knew Kate very well’.

‘Some insiders wonder,’ wrote Bell for the Spectator on 6 August 2005, ‘whether her university meeting with Prince William can really be ascribed to coincidence. Although, at the time of making her application to universities, it was unknown where the prince was intending to go, it has been suggested that her mother persuaded Kate to reject her first choice on hearing the news.’

So the spirit of Lady Dorothy and her Silver Cross rode again, possibly in Carole Middleton, and certainly in her ambitious daughter who was willing to throw away the security of a place at Edinburgh and take her chances with St Andrews for the sake of a good history of art course – and, oh yes, the associated chance of meeting a prince and becoming ‘the top brick in the chimney’. Kate Middleton’s dramatic last-moment switch of university in August 2000 and her decision to delay her studies by twelve months would seem to display our future consort in a more ambitious and socially striving light than we have previously imagined …

Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. What is wrong with a bright and striving girl nursing the ambition to become England’s sixth Queen Catherine?

* Anglo-American editor Tina Brown cannily took The Daily Beast as the title of the online news magazine that she created in 2008 with businessman Barry Diller.

7
An Heir and a ‘Spare’

‘I felt the whole country was in labour with me.’

(Diana, Princess of Wales, Panorama, November 1995)

Diana, Princess of Wales was on Valium when she conceived her first son and sovereign-for-the-twenty-first-century, William, in the autumn of 1981 – ‘high doses of Valium,’ as she later recalled, ‘and everything else’.

So her pregnancy was a reprieve – she could come off all the drugs. ‘Thank heavens for William!’

But with the Valium-assisted future monarch came morning sickness. ‘Couldn’t sleep, didn’t eat, whole world was collapsing around me,’ she described to Andrew Morton. ‘Very very difficult pregnancy indeed … All the analysts and psychiatrists came plodding in to try and sort me out.’

The experts’ diagnosis was sympathetic, but they could hardly offer the princess a solution, since their verdict basically set out the dilemma in which this less-than-prepared twenty-year-old found herself trapped – ‘One minute I was nobody. The next minute I was Princess of Wales, mother, media toy, member of this family, you name it …’

Matters came to a head that Christmas of 1981, when the family decamped to Sandringham for what was supposed to be a holiday.

‘I threw myself down the stairs,’ Diana told Morton. ‘Charles said I was crying wolf, and I said I felt so desperate and I was crying my eyes out and he said: “I’m not going to listen. You’re always doing this to me. I’m going riding now.” So I threw myself down the stairs. The Queen comes out, absolutely horrified, shaking – she was so frightened … Charles went out riding and when he came back, you know, it was just dismissal. Total dismissal. He just carried on out of the door.’

The Prince of Wales’s behaviour reflected the advice of some of his trusted friends who had come to feel he should be tougher with what they interpreted as Diana’s self-indulgence – they felt that the princess needed to ‘pull herself together’. But Charles quickly abandoned that tactic. He could see that his young wife would not be in such misery if it were not for her extraordinary and scrutinised position bearing a future heir to the throne – ‘the demands were too great, the pressures too daunting, the loss of freedom too stifling’.

As the delivery date grew closer he spent more and more time with his wife, eventually taking her to St Mary’s, Paddington, with the dawn on 21 June 1982, and staying beside her throughout her long and painful labour which had lasted all day.

‘I felt the whole country was in labour with me,’ Diana said.

‘The arrival of our small son has been an astonishing experience,’ Charles wrote a few days later to his godmother, Patricia Brabourne, ‘and one that has meant more to me than I could ever have imagined … I am so thankful I was beside Diana’s bedside the whole time, because by the end of the day I really felt as though I’d shared deeply in the process of birth, and as a result was rewarded by seeing a small creature which belonged to us, even though he seemed to belong to everyone else as well!’

Charles was the first royal male known to be present at a birth – and it was the first time that an heir to the throne had been delivered in a hospital rather than in a royal home or palace. Tens of thousands of people had been milling outside St Mary’s all day chanting ‘We want Charlie!’ and when the prince finally emerged sometime after 10 p.m., having smartened up and straightened his regimental striped tie, the cheers were deafening. One well-wisher planted a kiss on his cheek, leaving a smudge of lipstick.

‘You’re very kind,’ the prince responded with a smile – and broke more fresh ground by lingering with the crowd informally for a chat. Asked if the baby looked like him, he replied, ‘No, he’s lucky enough not to.’ And that was the line that the Queen followed when she came to visit her grandson the next day – ‘Thank goodness he hasn’t got ears like his father.’

William was ten months old when his parents embarked on their first major foreign tour together, to Australia and New Zealand in March 1983, taking their baby son with them, to be based with his nanny at the Woomargama sheep station in New South Wales. It made for an unusual tour structure, and Buckingham Palace did not greatly approve of the couple’s breaking off from their timetable at regular intervals to fly back to Woomargama. But it brought the young family together as never before.

‘I still can’t get over our luck in finding such an ideal place,’ Charles wrote home to friends. ‘We were extremely happy there whenever we were allowed to escape. The great joy was that we were totally alone together.’

This was the moment, on the other side of the world, when William chose to start moving.

‘I must tell you that your godson couldn’t be in better form,’ wrote Charles to Lady Susan Hussey, the Queen’s great friend and lady-in-waiting. ‘Today he actually crawled for the first time. We laughed and laughed with sheer, hysterical pleasure and now we can’t stop him crawling about everywhere. They pick up the idea very quickly don’t they, when they’ve managed the first move?’

Within a week or so William was moving at ‘high speed’, reported his proud father, ‘knocking everything off the tables and causing unbelievable destruction. He will be walking before long and is the greatest possible fun. You may have seen some photographs of him recently when he performed like a true professional in front of the cameras and did everything that could be expected of him. It is really encouraging to be able to provide people with some nice jolly news for a change!’

As the future King William V performed in public for the first time, Diana made her own debut on the international scene – and it could not have come at a better moment. The royal couple had brought William along at the suggestion of Malcolm Fraser, the Liberal prime minister of Australia who had proposed the tour. But in the meantime Fraser had lost an election by a landslide to the anti-royal Labour leader Robert ‘Bob’ Hawke, who made no secret of his republican feelings – he wanted to see Australia jettison the entire outdated monarchical nonsense.

‘I don’t regard welcoming them as the most important thing I’m going to have to do in my first nine months in office,’ said the new prime minister bluntly. ‘I don’t think we will be talking about kings of Australia forever more.’

Diana soon had Hawke hauling down his flag.

‘I’d seen the crowds in Wales,’ said the photographer Jayne Fincher, recalling the enthusiasm that had greeted Diana in the principality the previous year, ‘but the crowds in Australia were incredible. We went to Sydney and wanted to photograph her with the Opera House, but just when we got there it was like the whole of Sydney had come out. It was just a sea of people … and all you could see was the top of this little pink hat bobbing along.’

In their forty flights shuttling between Australia’s six states and two territories, Charles and Diana transformed the anti-crown dynamic that had greeted their arrival. By the end of the tour an opinion poll revealed that Australian monarchists had come to outnumber republicans two to one, and even Bob Hawke had fallen under Diana’s spell. His wife, Hazel, actually found herself curtsying to the princess.

The success brought a certain uplift to the Waleses’ previously depressed marriage. As they drove together through the vast crowds in their open car, Diana regularly reached for her husband’s hand and squeezed it hard for comfort.

‘Ron, isn’t she absolutely beautiful?’ asked Charles of the AP photographer Ron Bell, as the royal couple stepped out of the lift during a reception in Melbourne. ‘I’m so proud of her.’

Crowds cheered when Diana got out of the car on their side of the street for any of the massively attended joint walkabouts – while those on the other side would groan in open disappointment at the prospect of having to put up with the prince.

‘It’s not fair, is it?’ he would grin in a sporting attempt to shrug his shoulders. ‘You’d better ask for your money back.’

It was not long, however, before the couple’s press secretary, Vic Chapman, started receiving disgruntled late-night calls from Charles complaining about his scarce column inches when compared to the acres devoted to his wife. The prince retreated into the ‘light’ reading he had brought along – Turgenev’s First Love and Jung’s Psychological Reflections. They helped him, he wrote in a letter home, ‘preserve my sanity and my faith when all is chaos, crowds, cameras, politicians, cynicism, sarcasm and intense scrutiny …

‘I do feel desperate for Diana,’ he continued. ‘There is no twitch she can make without these ghastly, and I’m quite convinced mindless, people photographing it … What has got into them all? Can’t they see further than the end of their noses and to what it is doing to her? How can anyone, let alone a 21-year-old, be expected to come out of all this obsessed and crazed attention unscathed?’

For the future head of Britain’s most significant celebrity institution, Charles displayed a curious blindness to the realities of celebrity culture.

‘Princess Superstar!’ proclaimed the headlines. ‘Without a doubt,’ declared America’s Ladies’ Home Journal, ‘she’s the greatest media personality of the decade.’ The princess, wrote one columnist, had scored ‘a humdinger of a success’ in a sceptical and potentially hostile atmosphere.

Almost single-handed, according to most commentators, Diana had saved Australia from becoming a republic – and if Charles did not get it, the young princess did. Finally she started to believe in herself.

‘When we came back from our six-week tour,’ she said later, ‘I was a different person. I was more grown up, more mature … I learned to be royal, in inverted commas, in one week.’

Britain’s left-wing Daily Mirror, not always an admirer of the monarchy, editorialised that Diana had done ‘more for the Royalty she married into than other Princesses who were born into it’.

This was a less than subtle dig by the Mirror at Diana’s sister-in-law Princess Anne, whose notorious frostiness seemed to grow a couple of degrees chillier whenever the subject of Diana came up. Aged thirty-one and a mother of two, Anne had been particularly unreceptive to the good news of William’s arrival in June 1982, which had happened while she was in the American Southwest touring Indian reservations in New Mexico on behalf of Save the Children.

‘I didn’t know she had one,’ the princess snapped when asked by one reporter about Diana’s baby.

‘Do you think everyone is making too much fuss of the baby?’ asked another.

‘Yes,’ Anne replied shortly, moving on.

‘Sweet as vinegar, cutting as a knife,’ commented William Hickey in the Daily Express.

‘Anne’s behaviour,’ said the Mirror, ‘has confirmed for many Americans the stories that she is jealous of the adoration lavished on the Princess of Wales.’

There was a certain truth to this. In the early 1980s, the hard-working Anne was carrying out over two hundred engagements every year, compared to Diana’s fifty or so – and an unimpressive ninety-plus for Charles.

‘Anne works very hard,’ explained one palace insider, ‘and sees her sister-in-law picking up the glory. She’s sick to the back teeth with it all.’

The conflict came into the open when it was time to choose the godparents for William. In 1977 Anne had invited Charles to be the godfather of her firstborn, Peter Phillips, but the prince did not return the compliment when it came to William – or, rather, according to rumour, he had very much wanted to invite his sister, only to be blocked by his wife. Diana had sensed the disdain of her no-nonsense sister-in-law, who was reported to find Diana ‘gooey’, and even to have labelled her ‘the Dope’.

William’s godparents were certainly not headline-catchers: the Queen’s lady-in-waiting Susan Hussey, and cousin Alexandra of Kent; the Duchess of Westminster; Lord Romsey; the inevitable Laurens van der Post; and another of Charles’s friends – Constantine II, the Hampstead-dwelling ex-king of Greece.

Prince Philip shrugged his shoulders at the roll call, assuming that the omission of Anne would be corrected next time round. But when Prince Harry appeared in the autumn of 1984, Anne would once again be omitted from the list – and the princess took it personally when she discovered that her younger brother Andrew had been selected from her siblings as a godparent for Harry, rather than herself. There was a former flatmate of Diana’s, Carolyn Bartholomew; a wealthy polo-playing friend of Charles’s, Gerald Ward; Princess Margaret’s daughter, Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones; a Gloucestershire neighbour, Celia Vestey; and the painter Bryan Organ, who had executed flattering portraits of both Diana and Charles – ‘Yawns all round’ was the press verdict on the list.

But Anne made her feelings obvious on the day. As the three-month-old Prince Henry Charles Albert David, third in line to the British throne, was being baptised at Windsor in the presence of the Queen, the Queen Mother, Philip and the rest of the royal family, there were two conspicuous absentees. His aunt Anne and her husband Captain Mark Phillips were out in the Gloucestershire countryside, eighty-five miles to the west, shooting rabbits. They had sent their children Peter, seven, and Zara, three, to the ceremony along with their apologies. But their shooting party, they explained, took precedence – it was a long-established date.

‘Don’t read a family row into it, for God’s sake,’ said Mark’s mother Anne. ‘The Princess and my son invited a party of 10 guns for a shoot three months ago. They decided it would be unfair to let these people down.’

Looking back three decades later from the twenty-first century, the 1984 row over Anne not being invited to become Harry’s godmother seems neither here nor there. But just imagine if Anne had been serving as the prince’s godmother in the years after the death of Diana in 1997. Would she not then have become the closest thing that Harry, twelve, had to a real mother?

In those tragic circumstances, Anne might well have operated alongside brother Charles as a more harmonious parental unit for Harry than anything the boy had previously known. The princess might be notorious for her prickly, shoulder-shrugging ‘bolshie’ mode, but this stemmed from an independence of mind that could see through the royal nonsense – harmonising with the reservations that Harry himself would come to feel about the values of royalty as he grew older.

Anne would certainly have been the one senior member of the royal family who was on the same wavelength as Harry as his disaffection with ‘royalness’ developed – and that disaffection was to grow so strong that he would take his own son across the Atlantic in order to escape the same fate. Would it have made any difference to this outcome if the prince had been under the godmotherly guidance of the ‘Great Stroppy One’ who successfully raised her own children, Peter and Zara, without titles and as non-royals?

Anne did manage to keep both of them living, for the most part, in Great Britain.

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