by Dylan Howard
The boys being at school ended the last tenuous thread between Charles and Diana. He endured her constant sneering at his stuffiness and fuddy-duddy interests.
“You look like a stiff!” she yelled at him, according to Lady Colin Campbell. “You embarrass me in front of my friends!” He had tried to arrange psychiatric help for her, to address her fragile mental health and worsening bulimia. Yet the very public narrative offered by Diana meant that for years after the eventual divorce, Charles was painted as a scheming cold-hearted fish, suckering in a naive innocent English rose.
Talking to her friend Princess Margaret of Hesse and the Rhine, Diana claimed that “he [Charles] tried to lay a head-trip on me, saying that my behavior drove him away. My behavior had nothing to do with it. He was having an affair with that woman all along. That was the problem, that’s what caused my behavior … No wonder he couldn’t give me the love I needed. He was giving it all to Camilla fucking Parker Bowles.”
Despite both being sequestered at boarding school, it was impossible for the young Princes not to be aware of the problems facing their parents, especially as Diana would frequently cry on William’s shoulder, according to former royal protection officer Ken Wharfe. They were also often confronted with another “friend” of their mother’s, with whom they would have to politely acknowledge as being at least a fleeting source of happiness to her. This—combined with their own impending adolescences and the public scrutiny of their lives—ratcheted up the pressure on them to barely tolerable levels.
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Located twenty-five miles from central London, sprawling across twenty acres of English countryside, Eton school was founded in 1440 by King Henry VI, ironically to provide a launch pad for poorer boys who wanted to go to Cambridge University. With annual fees today in excess of $52,000 per year, those days are clearly long gone. Today, Eton is known worldwide as Britain’s premier educational establishment, having produced nineteen prime ministers (including David Cameron and Boris Johnson), assorted actors (including Eddie Redmayne, Tom Hiddleston, and Damien Lewis), as well as, of course, most sons of the aristocracy, including, not so long ago, Princes William and Harry.
A world of tradition, privilege, arcane rituals, and rugged British values, Eton’s reputation as a breeding ground for gentlemen stands alone. The uniform of tailcoat, stiff collar, white tie, waistcoat, striped trousers, and top hat (worn only on special occasions) in the nineteenth century was originally designed to wipe out any foppish tendencies the aristocratic youngsters may have had. The anachronistic get-up today denotes the British devotion to history.
Eton had been described in the past as “the nursery of England’s gentlemen” and “the chief nurse of England’s statesmen.” When it came to decide a school for their sons, both Charles and Diana favored it, the former so they could be spared the horrors of Gordonstoun, the latter so that her sons could follow in the Spencer family tradition. William, having thrived at the small elite Ludgrove Prep school, graduated to Eton in 1995 at the age of thirteen. The world’s media showed up to see the young Prince, blushing bashfully under his thick blond fringe and dressed up like a particularly dashing penguin. Both his parents, in a rare show of unity, showed up to escort him to school on his first day.
“That period when Harry and William went there, it was kind of a major transition from when Eton had gone from being kind of a preserve of the landed gentry, where you have a lot of real idiots there, to be a proper academic powerhouse,” one former pupil said. “William was very integrated. I think Harry probably had it harder finding his way. The attitude towards them was very matter of fact and every now and again the Queen would turn up for something, and we thought, ‘Oh, the Queen’s here, that’s pretty neat,’ we all got to stand and wave our little flags and shout three cheers for the Queen.”
Less academically inclined than his brother, Harry, who followed William to Eton in 1998, was also popular among his fellow pupils, not least for his daring exploits on the athletic field (he scored an exceedingly rare rugby goal in the infamously grueling Eton-Wall game), but in later life would play down his time at the school.
“I didn’t enjoy school at all,” he told a group of South African students on a trip to Cape Town in 2015. “When I was at school I wanted to be the bad boy.” Arriving at the school in the immediate aftermath of his mother’s death and struggling to manage the myriad emotions the trauma sparked, Harry’s turbulent adolescence meant he had a far bumpier ride through his teens.
Nevertheless, despite enjoying accolades such as House Captain of Games, representing his school at rugby, cricket, and polo, and excelling in the Combined Cadet Force, Harry was, by his own admission, marking time at Eton before he could fulfill his dream of joining the military proper.
“Harry was a couple of years above me, I think,” recalled another pupil. “The school and all the people there wanted to make him feel included. He had normal friends; he used to go to people’s birthday parties. He used to go out with people in London and go to clubs.”
Like his younger brother, William had immediately made his mark as an excellent sportsman. He captained his house football team and took up water polo. In addition to this responsibility, he was also joint Captain (at Eton known as “keeper”) of Swimming, House Captain of Games, and (in his final year) House Captain.
Unlike his brother, though, William achieved the ultimate Eton honor of becoming one of the twenty-one school prefects, or, as Eton terminology had it, in “Pop.” He acted on stage, including taking a part in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which was watched in 1998 by the Queen and her husband Prince Philip, presumably with more sensitivity than when they had watched his father’s Macbeth at Gordonstoun.
However, William also revealed a canny knack of knowing when to retreat and avoid hogging the limelight. The family often recalls how at the age of fourteen, he instructed his parents not to attend the most important day of the school’s calendar—the Fourth of June celebrations—because he believed that their presence, and that of their bodyguards (and possibly the invited press), would spoil this “parents’ day” for his peers. William’s parents accepted his request, and his unofficial nanny, Tiggy Legge-Bourke, attended in their place. At the same time, it amplified Diana’s paranoia about Tiggy usurping her position. (She was already wrongly convinced that Charles and Tiggy were having an affair, as was widely known among the palace.)
William became secretary of the Agricultural Club and, after joining the school’s Army cadet force, received Eton’s Sword of Honor, the school’s highest award for a first-year army cadet. As if this weren’t enough, he achieved the accolade of being fastest junior swimmer at Eton in ten years, something that especially thrilled his water-loving mother.
William gained a total of twelve GCSE passes (three taken a year early), including top marks in English, History, and Languages before going on to study Geography, English, and History of Art at A Level, when he achieved A, C, and B grades. In 1998, Harry left Eton with B and D grades in Art and Geography. There was an unseemly postscript to Harry’s Eton career, when a sacked teacher accused Prince Harry of cheating on his A-Level exams in order to gain entry to his dream school, Sandhurst Military Academy. Sarah Forsyth claimed she ghost-wrote his A-level Art coursework. She was subsequently awarded £45,000 in damages, without any undue blame being attached to Harry or the school.
It was during William’s time at Eton, and Harry’s at Ludgrove Prep, that the event occurred that would change their world—and the world around them—forever.
THE DEATH OF DIANA
If I had known that was the last time I was going to speak to her the conversation would have gone in a very different direction.
—PRINCE HARRY
On the night of August 30, 1997, Princes William and Harry were staying, as was traditional, with their father and grandparents at Balmoral, the Royals’ summer retreat in the Scottish Highlands. Speaking some years later, William recalled how, despite a tiring day ro
mping around the hills and fells, he found it unusually hard to fall sleep that night and woke up frequently.
That evening, his mother had been enjoying a romantic break in Paris, with Dodi Fayed, the playboy son of Harrods boss and Egyptian-born tycoon, Mohamed Al-Fayed. After a summer’s fun with Dodi cruising around the Aegean and Mediterranean seas on the Al-Fayed yacht Jonikal and zipping around Europe’s most chic resorts, Diana had been looking forward to getting back to London and spending some quality time with her sons, before they returned to their respective schools in September. That evening, she had placed a call to Balmoral to say hello to her two boys, aged twelve and fifteen. Speaking on a BBC documentary marking the twentieth anniversary of her death, William recalled that moment.
“I remember getting a phone call at the time [that evening] and you think it’s just a parent ringing up to have a chat and I think both Harry and I spoke to her and said we were missing her, and we wish you were back and lots of stuff,” William detailed.
“I think it was probably about teatime for us,” added Harry. “I was a typical young kid running around playing games with my brother and cousins and being told ‘Mummy’s on the phone, mummy’s on the phone’ and was like, ‘Right, I just really want to play.’ And if I had known that was the last time I was going to speak to her the conversation would have gone in a very different direction.”
At 7:15 a.m. on the morning of August 31, Charles woke his sons up and broke the news that had been confirmed barely three hours earlier and had already spread across the world. Their mother had been killed in a horrible car accident in Paris, alongside her lover Dodi Fayed and driver Henri Paul. Their bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, was the sole survivor.
It was at 12:23 a.m. when Henri Paul had lost control of the Mercedes, following a dramatic, high-speed chase through Paris, pursued by paparazzi on scooters and motorbikes. As I detailed in my 2019 book, Diana: Case Solved, Diana’s car collided with a white Fiat Uno being driven by Le Van Thanh. Before entering the Pont de l’Alma tunnel, Henri Paul clipped Van Thanh, spun around, and smashed into the thirteenth supporting pillar. According to Vincent Messina, a racing and ABS brake expert, Paul was clearly going over the speed limit at the time of the crash. Dodi and Henri Paul were killed immediately. Although he suffered terrible facial injuries, Trevor Rees-Jones survived—his life saved by the airbag and the fact he, unlike the others, was wearing a seatbelt.
When paramedics arrived, they had to clear the crash site of paparazzi, frantically taking pictures of the dying Princess. In the back-right side, Diana was still alive and crouched on the floor with her back to the road and her legs up on the seat. Her face and body appeared remarkably untouched by the carnage. There was little sign of serious injury other than a trickle of blood from her mouth and nose. But that face, known by people the world over, was blank, her eyes blinking.
Shocked eyewitnesses said she repeatedly murmured, “Oh, my God!” and then “Leave me alone.” Those were her last words.
A French doctor driving through the tunnel, Dr. Frederic Mailliez, was the first to try to help moments before police arrived at 12:28 a.m. It wasn’t until 1 a.m. that Diana was removed from the car into an ambulance. Shortly after, she suffered a massive heart attack, and although her breathing was restarted she was found to have extensive internal injuries. Her heart had been pushed to the right side of her chest, tearing her pulmonary vein and causing internal bleeding.
At 1:25 a.m., the ambulance carrying Diana left for the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, 3.7 miles away, arriving there at 2:06 a.m. Despite intense and prolonged efforts there to resuscitate her, French doctors pronounced the Princess dead at 3 a.m., local time.
William recalled the shock of the news making him “disoriented, dizzy … and very confused. I remember just feeling completely numb. And you keep asking yourself ‘Why me?’ all the time. ‘What have I done?’”
Harry, meanwhile, recalled their father’s gentle stoicism in breaking the news. “One of the hardest things for a parent to do is to tell your children that your other parent has died. But he was there for us.” Floored with grief, self-pity, and regret, meanwhile, Charles turned to his courtiers. “They’re all going to blame me, aren’t they?” he groaned, presciently, according to author Tom Bower in Rebel Prince: The Power, Passion and Defiance of Prince Charles.
The news shattered Britain. Speaking that morning, Prime Minister Tony Blair described Diana as “the People’s Princess.” With the utterance of that now-legendary phrase, he unleashed a veritable tsunami of grief across the country—and the world. Britain collectively wept, grieved, raged, and emoted like never before.
Up at Balmoral, William, Harry, and the Royals were receiving frantic briefings from Buckingham Palace describing the escalating crisis in the capital. It had been naively assumed in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy that Diana’s funeral would be a simple Spencer family affair, despite her still being technically a member of the Royal Family. But it was almost immediately apparent that this would be woefully insufficient. Returning Diana’s body home from Paris, Charles’s team prepared to take her to a mortuary in Chelsea, central London. Charles angrily instructed them to take her body to lie at St James’s Palace, as befitting a royal. It was clear that Diana’s funeral would be a historic event.
The morning of Diana’s death, the Queen and Princes Philip and Charles quickly formed a protective shield around the stunned William and Harry. Also present, by sheer luck, was their much-loved nanny, Tiggy Legge-Bourke, who had planned to escort them back to London that day, to be reunited with their mother, who had planned to return from Paris that evening.
That morning, the young Princes asked specifically to be taken to the tiny local church at Craithie, where the usual service took place with no mention of Diana. Later, William took the first of a number of long solitary walks across the Highlands, with his black Labrador, Widgeon. The Queen and Prince Philip, he later recalled, provided a close, sympathetic, and loving support network, the latter especially belying his gruff public reputation.
Down in London and across the world, shock was turning to anger, as the circumstances around Diana’s death became known. Whipped up by the media, smarting from the blame for Diana’s death, and seeking to deflect some of the blame—the public began calling for the Queen to make an appearance. The Royal policy of closing ranks and mourning in private was being portrayed as a cold, out-of-touch callousness, quite erroneously. Fanning the flames of public emotion, speaking from his home in South Africa, Diana’s brother, Charles, angrily announced that the media had Diana’s “blood on their hands.”
Having pursued a not-always-uncooperative Diana for years, it was in the global media’s interests to find a common target for the anger. After days of unprecedented headlines in the papers, condemning the Royals for their silence, the monarch cut short her holiday and, along with Princes Charles and Philip, returned to London with the grieving Princes. William and Harry both have recalled the excruciating public walkabout with their father, in a sea of ugly weeping and wailing by strangers reaching for them, pawing at them, sobbing, and displaying a grief that shocked and greatly upset the two boys, who had barely begun to process their bereavement themselves. On the urging of her advisors and the prime minister’s office, that evening, the monarch made an extraordinary television address, for only the second time in her reign [the first time was the Gulf War in 1990] in which she publicly paid tribute to Diana and to the British people.
Deciding to mourn in public had been “a very hard decision for my grandmother to make,” said William. “She felt very torn between being our grandmother and her Queen role. And I think she—everyone—was surprised and taken aback by the scale of what happened and the nature of how quickly it all happened.”
“A TIDAL WAVE OF GRIEF”
The reappearance of the Royals and the sight of the two heartbroken boys undertaking the brief walkabout seemed to quell the public furor. A date was set for the funeral,
September 6, at Westminster Abbey. It was not technically a State funeral, but at the urging of Prince Charles, it came about as close as it could possibly be without completely shredding royal protocol.
By convention, Diana, as a former Royal, would normally only qualify for a quiet interment at St George’s Chapel and burial at the small royal cemetery at Frogmore, London (near the home of Harry and Meghan, Duke and Duchess of Sussex, before their self-imposed exile). The Spencer family and the Queen also favored a small, dignified affair. But having seen the public fervor for commemorating Diana, the Prince of Wales quickly realized anything less than a major production would be a calamity. Therefore, it was an unprecedented show of pageantry and informality, pomp and populism, charity, celebrity, and aristocracy.
The event was pulled together at top speed. Extreme shuttle diplomacy between Tony Blair’s team, the Royals at Balmoral, and the Spencer family was needed to assuage the heightened emotional and constitutional demands being placed on the principals, while the needs and wishes of Princes Harry and William were respected by all concerned. Observers at the time noted young Harry’s very apparent grief and shock—in contrast with William’s almost frightening levels of self-possession and emotional control. Only his repeatedly chilly loathing of the media belied his roiling emotions within, yet it was that very media that was now clamoring for Diana’s eldest son to make himself prominent during the service and especially in the preceding procession.
It had been suggested that William and Harry walk behind Diana’s coffin. Charles Spencer proposed that he alone should follow the coffin. Tony Blair wanted a “People’s Procession” whereby members of the public could form the funeral cortege. Prince Charles wanted to walk behind the coffin. Everyone wanted the two young Princes to walk behind the coffin, but all felt uncomfortable pushing the request, as William had refused point-blank, feeling it was a sop to the loathed media. Harry immediately followed his brother’s lead. Rumor had it at the time that Charles had urged the young Princes to walk with him to deflect any spontaneous outbursts of anger. “There was genuine concern as to what reaction the public might have to the Prince of Wales,” explained Charles’s press secretary, Sandy Henney, to royal biographer Penny Junor. “[But] at no time was there ever a question of using the boys as a barrier against possible reaction from the public towards my boss.”