by Dylan Howard
“Diana had her own enormous dressing room, full of the hustle and bustle of people coming and going, flowers being delivered, and all the rest of it,” remembered bridesmaid India Hicks, in Rosalind Coward’s book Diana The Portrait: Anniversary Edition. Describing the scene hours before Diana walked down the aisle, Hicks said: “I distinctly remember there was a small television on the side of this dressing table, and Diana was seated in front of it, again, dressed in her jeans, and the tiara was being put on her head. She started to shoo anyone who got in the way of the television screen out of the way, because, obviously, she was very excited to see herself on television … and then the commercials came on, and there was the ‘Just One Cornetto’ ice-cream commercial.
“Diana started to sing, and we all started to sing along, too … It sort of indicated, I think, the sort of mixture of feelings around getting dressed—she was obviously intrigued to see herself on television, and relaxed enough to be able to sing, but yet sort of nervous enough that we’re all laughing and joking along.”
The dress itself had been carefully delivered the night before in an unmarked van that had been hired and driven personally by David Emanuel, so nervous was he of any mishaps en route. Now, as the morning wore on, more and more anxious Palace officials ran around, fussing over the Princess-to-be and generally making everyone nervous.
The Emanuels were ushered into a bedroom to dress Diana, mindful of her freshly applied makeup and hair. Despite the high tension in the room, the trio managed to find enough laughter in the chaos to lighten the mood. As David crawled under Diana’s petticoats to affix a final button, the Queen Mother decided to pop in to wish Diana luck. David emerged to find the redoubtable dowager peering at him in astonishment.
While David was burrowing through Diana’s petticoats, outside, the preparations were well under way. By daybreak, tons of sand, for the procession’s horses, were spread along the two-mile route through the historic heart of London, already lined by hundreds of policemen, who were joined by 2,228 members of Britain’s armed services. Behind them were tens of thousands of spectators, many having camped out for several days. Meanwhile, four thousand police officers were busy preparing for a massive security operation to ensure the safety not only of the Royals, but also of visiting dignitaries and guests for any threats or suspicious activities.
Then there were the technicians for a hundred television companies from fifty countries, setting up several hundred cameras, 750 miles of cable, and 330 control circuits to broadcast the procession and wedding ceremony to more than 750 million viewers across the globe, helped by several thousand reporters, photographers, and radio and television technicians. In any event, it became the most-watched Royal wedding in history. “A great ceremonial occasion that assumed the gaiety of a carnival rather than the gravity of state,” observed London’s The Times newspaper at the time. “In a grey world, for a troubled nation smarting from a crown of social and political thorns, it was a day of unbridled romance, color and celebration, shared with half the globe.”
The wedding day was declared a national holiday. The center of London was closed down to traffic, and a holiday spirit pervaded much of the rest of the city and country, as thousands prepared to watch the hours of pageantry on television before moving outside for a jubilant afternoon and evening of neighborhood street parties.
Surrounded by cheering crowds, Diana arrived at the Cathedral that sunny morning with hope in her heart that Charles’s reticence and emotional distance would melt in the sunshine of this tremendous global outpouring of love and goodwill for the couple. Her father, Earl Spencer, heaved himself out of the open carriage (he had recently suffered a stroke and had battled to prepare himself for the big day). Standing near the entrance were Elizabeth and David Emanuel. As they watched Diana climb the steps, the Emanuels’ hearts sank—the dress was noticeably crumpled.
“I remember whispering to David: ‘Oh my God, it’s creased,’” Elizabeth later said. “I thought: ‘We’ve got to straighten out that dress.’ But, when she came out of that carriage, it was the most wonderful vision I’d ever seen. She looked like a butterfly emerging from her chrysalis, unfurling her wings and about to fly. It was so romantic. Oddly, the imperfections seemed to make her even more beautiful.”
While the world watched on television, Elizabeth and David, with the help of the bridesmaids, smoothed out Diana’s dress, adjusted her veil, and spread out that astonishing train. Then Diana, to roars from the crowds, on her father’s frail arm, entered the Cathedral in front of millions of people, worldwide, to marry her Prince.
But as she walked down the aisle with her father, the organ playing the “Prince of Denmark’s March” and the eyes of the world upon her, Diana drew in her breath in horror. Standing in a pale gray dress with a veiled pillbox hat, Camilla stood to one side of the congregation, right in the sightline of the bride, rendering Diana stunned moments before she shared her vows with the waiting Prince.
This was Diana’s most “vivid” memory of the wedding day, she later confided to biographer Andrew Morton. “I was furious,” Diana would say later of her emotions after learning too late that Camilla was on the wedding guest list. “I wanted to turn and run. If I’d had the courage I would have hitched up my dress and bolted out the church.”
Nevertheless, at 11:20 a.m., the couple exchanged vows. Diana, in a state of high anxiety only compounded by Camilla’s neutral gaze, botched Charles’s name. Charles, also distracted, messed up his lines too. The press beamed at the “ordinariness” of the couple in fudging their words. The real reason would not be publicly known for many years hence.
The parties, receptions, balls, and celebrations carried on far into the night, accompanied by nationwide firework displays and a network of flaming beacons. In a moment of posthuptial euphoria, Diana described Charles to a relative later, writing: “There were several times when I was perilously close to crying from the sheer joy of it all.” For her part, Diana enthused, “It was heaven, amazing, wonderful, though I was so nervous when I was walking up the aisle that I swore my knees would knock and make a noise!”
“It was the worst day of my life,” she had also said of her wedding, a decade later. “If I could write my own script I would have my husband go away with his woman and never come back.”
Within days, the Princess was facing the harsh reality of her predicament as the bride of convenience to a man who expected her to stay silent as he carried on his life exactly as he wanted, with his much older mistress most definitely in tow.
Departing a London still bathed in postwedding fever, the newlyweds went by train to Broadlands, the Hampshire estate where the Queen and Prince Philip spent time as a young couple. This was followed by a fortnight’s cruise through the Mediterranean. Diana was so bored, she attempted to engage with the ship’s young crew members in friendly banter and cheeky chat, it was reported. At one point, she even appeared unannounced in the shower rooms, much to their discomfort.
Diana recalled how, on arriving at Broadlands on their first day as a married couple, Charles immediately unpacked seven novels by his favorite author, the South African philosopher Laurens van der Post, and settled down to start reading them.
“I thought, you know, it was just grim,” said Diana. “I just had tremendous hope in me, which was slashed by day two.”
To cap off the disappointing trip, she was taken up to Balmoral, the Scottish estate where the Royals traditionally retire for the summer. She continued her honeymoon in the company of the Queen, Prince Philip, the Queen Mother, and Charles’s three siblings, Anne, Andrew, and Edward. It was nothing like the romantic escape Diana had dreamed of her whole life. When she begged Charles to return to London, he quickly shot her down.
Initially, the couple went on public engagements together, but Charles became increasingly agitated by the attention his wife received. As “a proud man,” the Prince became so put out at being left in the shade that he demanded they work separately. Inevitabl
y, more cracks began to show, and Diana’s eating disorder intensified. Diana had dreamed of a loving father figure as a husband, a man who would nurture and encourage her. She got none of it.
“He [Charles] ignored me everywhere,” she told biographer Morton. It didn’t help that while Charles was portrayed as a great thinker and a man with many interests, Diana claimed she was treated like she was “stupid.”
Diana said she made the grave mistake once of saying to a child she was “thick as a plank” in order to ease the child’s nervousness, which it did. But that headline went all around the world, and she lived to regret it.
“Charles was in awe of his Mama, intimidated by his father, and I was always the third person in the room. It was never, ‘Darling, would you like a drink?’ It was always, ‘Mommy, would you like a drink?’ ‘Granny, would you like a drink?’ ‘Diana, would you like a drink?’ Fine, no problem. But I had to be told that was normal because I always thought it was the wife first—stupid thought!”
Nobody told Diana what was expected of her as the future Queen of England. As she spiraled out of emotional control, struggling with bulimia and so despondent, she tried to kill herself up to five times, according to the British tabloids. Remarkably, there was no sympathy from Charles—and certainly none from the Firm. In recounting the toll, the Los Angeles Times noted, “Diana was said to have flung herself down stairs, cut her wrists with a razor, cut her chest and thighs with a knife, thrown herself at a glass cabinet and cut herself with a lemon slicer in tormented cries for help.”
“Well, maybe I was the first person ever to be in this family who ever had depression or was ever openly tearful,” Diana later told Morton. “I couldn’t believe how cold everyone was.”
Over the years, Diana changed from a shy, self-effacing young woman afraid of putting a foot out of place to a force to be reckoned with. So much so that a year before her divorce from Charles became official on August 28, 1996, she refused to be intimidated by Prince Philip when he warned: “If you don’t behave, my girl, we’ll take your title away.”
“My title (The Lady Diana Frances Spencer) is a lot older than yours, Philip,” she shot back, noting that the Spencer family was older and more aristocratic than the House of Windsor.
Speaking later to Martin Bashir in her 1995 BBC interview, Diana said the royal household saw her “as a threat of some kind”: “I think every strong woman in history has had to walk down a similar path, and I think it’s the strength that causes the confusion and the fear. Why is she strong? Where does she get it from? Where is she taking it? Where is she going to use it? Why do the public still support her?”
As it turned out, it was the Royals who should have taken their cues from Diana if they were to adapt to the kind of monarchy the public wanted in the twenty-first century. But they certainly put her through the wringer first.
She noted, “I do things differently, because I don’t go by a rule book, because I lead from the heart, not the head, and albeit that’s got me into trouble in my work, I understand that. But someone’s got to go out there and love people and show it.”
Although she was seen by the senior Royals as a rebel intent on making them look bad and refusing to kowtow to convention, Diana said she always did her very best to conform and do what was expected of her, even after her marriage turned sour: “They can’t find fault with me when I’m in their presence. I do as I’m expected. What they say behind my back is none of their business.”
But the die had been cast. Charles continued to see Camilla, despite Diana’s full awareness of the situation. The couple found each other’s company trying, yet the pressure for a fairy-tale romance meant that in public, all was well. Meanwhile, each evening at home, Charles would retire to his study, his beloved books, and classical music. Or he would discreetly slip into the night to meet Camilla. Diana, isolated from her old friends, spent days alone, apart from royal flunkeys and courtiers, wandering the endless corridors of Kensington Palace. Wary of her new in-laws and aware of their increasingly chilly view of her emotional temperament, she would stay in, watch soap operas, and binge and purge, binge and purge, binge and purge. Charles and she spent very little private time together, but the pressure was on for her to produce an heir to the throne.
THE HEIR AND THE SPARE
Just after 9 p.m., on the evening of June 21, 1982, Diana gave birth at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, to William Arthur Philip Louis—a prince from birth and immediately second in the rank of succession. Prince Charles, who broke royal precedent by being present at the birth, later wrote: “I have never seen such scenes as there were outside the hospital when I left that night—everyone had gone berserk with excitement.”
The nation came as close to collective celebration as a country could, that day. The blushing Princess, who had charmed the patrician editors of the British tabloid media from day one, handled her public appearances throughout her pregnancy with aplomb, prompting grannies around the world to send scores of knitted bootees and jackets to Buckingham Palace for the impending arrival. But behind the scenes, the marriage was unraveling at an alarming speed. On one occasion, when Diana was pregnant with William, she claimed to have attempted suicide. “I warned [Charles] I’d take my own life. He just sneered and said I would never do it. So I stood at the top of the stairs and threw myself down.”
A shocked Queen Mother discovered her, in a crumpled heap at the bottom of the stairs. This was not the Royal way of doing things, naturally, so the matter was quickly hushed up before it could reach the ears of the press.
But Diana was determined. She cut her wrists with a razor, slashed at her chest and thighs with a knife, threw herself at a glass cabinet, and even hacked at herself with a lemon slicer in frustrated, frantic bids to get her husband to take some notice of her. And her violent behavior wasn’t confined just to self-harm. In Diana: The Intimate Portrait, Judy Wade describes another battle royale some years later, in the parking lot of Smith’s Lawn polo field in Windsor. It began when Charles playfully and ill-advisedly tapped Diana on the head after she gave the Duchess of York’s father, Major Ronald Ferguson, a warm good-bye kiss.
“Diana was not about to let him get away with that and kicked out at her protesting husband, then gave him a hefty push,” wrote Wade. “In return, he shoved her back against her car. Diana then ducked for cover but, as she jumped into the driving seat, he brought one hand down on the back of her neck. Realizing that people were staring in amazement, the couple laughed, but no one was in any doubt that the pushing and shoving looked too forceful to be funny. The rows that were regularly taking place inside their home were now spilling out into public view.”
Things seemed to improve immediately following their son’s birth. Charles was genuinely keen to be a hands-on, modern dad, albeit a modern dad who had his toothpaste squeezed out for him each morning (as Diana’s former butler Paul Burrell claimed) and carried a white leather toilet seat with him for exclusive use when he was on the road. And once Diana had given birth, everyone in the Royal Family was thrilled. “It was all peaceful again,” remembered Diana, “and I was well for a time.”
This period was perhaps the most tranquil and happy era of the Waleses’ marriage. Charles was genuinely thrilled with his little son and, remembering the isolation and emotional repression of his own childhood, made every effort to plan his engagements and commitments around his baby boy. For his part, William was a lively, indulged child and the center of attention of a delighted nation. The apple of his mother’s eye, he forged an intense and increasingly codependent bond with her as he grew up. Across the Royal court there was a sense of relief that the emotionally volatile and unpredictable Diana had managed to fulfill her role as wife to the heir to the throne and produce the second in line. After a year or so with the “heir” in place, Diana announced she was pregnant with the “spare.”
ROYAL AFFAIRS
Suddenly, as Harry was born, it just went bang, our marriage. The whole thing went d
own the drain.
—DIANA, PRINCESS OF WALES
Charles wanted a baby girl. Contrary as ever, against traditional male roles in the Royals, he desperately hoped his second-born would be female. In September 1983, with William just over a year old, Diana had suffered a miscarriage while at Balmoral. Charles was sure it had been a girl. He girded his loins and did his duty again, and sure enough, in 1984, it was announced that the Princess of Wales was expecting again.
It was a difficult pregnancy, beset by sickness—Diana was now deep in the throes of bulimia—but ameliorated by the constant hovering fretfulness of her husband, with whom Diana had been enjoying an unprecedented closeness and tenderness. It was “the closest we’ve ever, ever been and ever will be,” she told biographer Andrew Morton of the weeks leading up to Harry’s birth, after a grueling nine-hour labor, on September 15, 1984.
“Oh God, it’s a boy—and he’s even got red hair!’’ exclaimed the Prince of Wales as his wife gave birth to a yowling Henry Charles Albert David Mountbatten-Windsor. Later, a flustered Prince claimed his startled reaction had been a “joke,” but his exhausted wife didn’t see it that way, feeling the comment was a snub to the Spencer family trait of ginger-haired children. Later, at Harry’s christening in December, Charles reportedly told Diana’s mother, Frances: “We were so disappointed—we thought it would be a girl!” “Mummy snapped his head off, saying, ‘You should realize how lucky you are to have a child that’s normal!’” Diana recounted. “Ever since that day the shutters have come down, and that’s what he [Charles] does when he gets somebody answering back at him.”
The press had been speculating on the Royal baby’s name for weeks, with George tipped as the front-runner (one bookmaker was offering 500-1 odds on the child being named Elvis). According to the Evening News, Harold Brooks-Baker, the director of Burke’s Peerage, said, “It is known in Royal circles that Charles plans to call one child George.” In any event, the baby was called Harry.