Later that year, the Queen would label 1992 as her annus horribilis. It cannot have been easy for Harry to start boarding school at the height of the War of the Waleses, as the spectacular unfurling of his parents’ marriage became known. The first shot across the bow had been the publication in March of that year of this author’s Diana in Private: The Princess Nobody Knows, which revealed that both the Prince and Princess of Wales had had extra-marital affairs, that she wanted out of the marriage, that she suffered from bulimia, and even that she believed that her late lover Barry Mannakee, formerly her protection officer, had been wiped out to prevent him from speaking out about their affair: a belief she would later confirm in print and on television. (The author never shared her belief, and always thought that Mannakee died in a genuine road accident.) The book became a worldwide best seller, hitting the New York Times and London Times Best Sellers lists. Several months later, Andrew Morton’s book Diana: Her True Story, was published. When it became apparent that this had been written with Diana’s connivance, the book made an even bigger splash, the public naively believing that its contents must be true if Diana was behind its publication. The reality was, of course, that Diana had contributed to the contents of both books, and the reason why the Morton book had come to be written was that she and this author had fallen out because of her determination to propound a version of her tale so heavily slanted in her favour that it was more propaganda than fact. From the children’s point of view, however, the most excruciating incident must have been the publication of the Squidgygate Tapes on the 23rd August 1992 in the Sun, the best-selling British tabloid. These tapes could also be listened to for a fee, and while the most intimate minutes had been edited out, the remainder left no room for doubt. Diana had been having an affair with James Gilbey and, even more importantly, her contempt for the Royal Family was self-evident. As she put it, resentful that they were not more grateful for her presence amongst them, ‘after all I’ve done for that fucking family.’
Worse was to emanate from the Wales quarter as Harry adjusted to his new school. In November, his parents went on a tour of South Korea. So disaffected was Diana’s demeanour, so self-evidently miserable was she in the presence of her husband, that the story became yet again the disastrous state of the Wales marriage, instead of Anglo/South Korean relations, as it was supposed to be. Ludgrove School’s response was to deny their students access to newspapers in the hope that Harry and William would not be affected by the public speculation about the state of their parents’ marriage.
In many ways, Ludgrove’s headmaster Gerald Barber could not have handled the situation better. By filtering out bad news, he created a cocoon in which his students flourished undisturbed by the ugly realities of the outside world. Harry and William were thereby protected as much as possible from the consequences of the scandal surrounding the disintegration of their parents’ marriage. They would attend classes, play games, interact with the other students as if life were continuing as normal outside the school’s precincts, when of course the opposite was true.
When Charles and Diana returned from the disastrous South Korean trip, the Queen consented to their separation. Up to then, she and Prince Philip had encouraged her daughter-in-law to stay within the marriage, but by now it was obvious to the Sovereign and her Consort that the only solution would be for Charles and Diana to part officially. With her goal of separation achieved, Diana arranged with Gerald Butler to meet her boys in his study, where she broke the news to them that she and Daddy would be living apart though they both still loved their boys and nothing would really change.
In truth, this was much more than a mere figure of speech. The reality is that the Prince and Princess of Wales had been de facto separated since Harry had been a toddler. Very little would change in terms of their actual lifestyle, except that Diana and Charles would no longer have to endure the excruciating pretence of being a couple on the few occasions that duty or convenience pitted them together. As Patrick Jephson, Diana’s Private Secretary, put it, weekends had been ‘a real source of difficulty for them both’ and now that they were separated, it was hoped that the tug of war which, it has to be said, Diana was largely responsible for, would come to an end. It did not, at least not in the shorter term, for Diana continued to make as many difficulties as she could. Only after she had overplayed her hand in the Martin Bashir interview in November 1995, which resulted in a host of unanticipated and unwanted difficulties for her, did she rethink her tactics and become more cooperative. And by then her boys had grown up sufficiently to be expressing their desire to spend more time with their father and his family in the country, enjoying rural pursuits such as shooting, stalking, fishing, and riding, rather than remaining in London with Diana at Kensington Palace, a metropolis which she found desirable, but whose attractions had palled for both boys, though these would return once they grew a bit older and nightlife became a bigger feature in their lives than it then was.
When Diana broke the news of the separation, Harry started to cry, but William, whose age had given him more insight into the realities of his parents’ lives, simply kissed her on the cheek and said he hoped she and Charles would ‘both be happier now’. After Diana had left, William, playing the bigger and wiser brother, suggested the way forward for both of them: they should not take sides, should show no preference, and should respect both their parents equally. Harry agreed, and thereafter that became the modus operandi of both boys.
For the three remaining years that William stayed at Ludgrove with Harry, the brothers’ performance could not have been more dissimilar. Harry’s academic performance was a repetition of Diana’s when she had been at the same school as her academically gifted eldest sister. But Diana saw no more reason for Harry’s performance to bother her than it had when she was in the same boat. The message she always gave out to Harry and everyone else was that they were two peas of one pod. Look at how well life had turned out for her. You didn’t need to achieve academically to flourish after school. Of course, she was right, but more than being technically right, she was playing to his strengths, and encouraging him to feel good about himself despite his poor scholastic results.
In 1995 William left Ludgrove and started at Eton. In September, Charles, Diana and Harry all accompanied him on his first day. Harry would join him three years later, by which time their mother was dead. Diana’s death hit both boys hard, but Harry was hit even harder than William. He had always been a mummy’s boy, and, being that much younger than William, was less well equipped to cope with the loss. By his own account, he ‘shut down emotionally’ and was ‘very angry’. This response did not help him academically, and his stay at Eton was ‘difficult’.
I know from friends whose children are presently attending Eton that, even now, the school regards it as a distinction to have educated the Heir and Spare to the Throne.
Nevertheless, Harry’s Eton days were anything but distinguished. ‘He would never have been accepted had he not been Prince Henry of Wales,’ an Old Etonian, who still maintains good links to the school, told me. ‘He simply did not possess the intelligence to perform adequately at such an academic school. He’d’ve been far better off attending Gordonstoun, where character counts far more than academic results.’
Another Etonian says, ‘To this day, there are all sorts of stories doing the rounds (at Eton) of how the school had to alter its academic requirements so that Harry could pass tests. And even then, he’d fail them, to the despair of his masters.’
Many of these claims were borne out by the findings of an Employment Tribunal in 2005, when Sara Forsyth, an art mistress, sued Eton for unfair dismissal. She maintained that she had been asked by the Head of Art, Ian Burke, ‘to assist Prince Harry with text for his expressive art project’ for his Art A-Level examination. During the trial, there was evidence suggesting that Eton had not only thrashed around to find positive ways of marking Harry’s entrance examinations, but that thereafter they had struggled to have him pas
s his further exams. The Headmaster, Tony Little, Deputy Headmaster, the Rev John Puddefoot, Ian Burke, and other members of ‘staff were bluntly accused by the tribunal of being unsatisfactory witnesses whose words were unreliable’ when it found in favour of Ms Forsyth. Damningly, the Tribunal concluded that while it was not called upon to find whether Eton had assisted Harry in cheating on his exams, this was because ‘(i)t is no part of this tribunal’s function to determine whether or not it was legitimate. That is for Edexcel’ - the examination board.’
By the time of Harry’s arrival at Eton, William had established himself as a successful student with both masters and pupils. He had done well academically. He was athletic. He got along with his peers. Later on, he would be elected into Pop, the group of prefects who ran the school, would be chosen as Head of the Oppidan Wall, and was awarded the Sword of Honour as an army cadet. ‘William was genuinely popular. He was liked by everyone. The same could not be said of Harry,’ a parent of one of Harry’s contemporaries told me. ‘Harry was not liked. He was bumptious and antagonistic. He was a very angry young man. He swanned around rubbing everyone’s nose in being Prince Henry of Wales: just the sort of thing not to do. Eton has always had royalty. The Queen’s Uncle Harry, the Duke of Gloucester, was at Eton, as were his two sons, Princes William and Richard and his nephews Eddie (the Duke of Kent) and Prince Michael. So too was Queen Mary’s brother Prince Alexander of Teck and his son, Prince Rupert, whose mother was Queen Victoria’s granddaughter Princess Alice of Albany. The King of Nepal, King Leopold III of the Belgians…the list is fairly endless. Harry had a definite chip on his shoulder and it made him unpopular.’
Harry would later claim that he struggled not only academically, but also with sports. Although he still excelled in them, even rugby was a problem because boys ‘would see me on the rugby field as an opportunity to smash me up.’ This, in truth, was only part of the problem. Harry could be needlessly vitriolic, such as when he was pitted against a Jewish opponent from one of the other top public schools and hurled anti-Semitic abuse at him, a fact I received from a priest who was at school with this boy. Just as how Meghan’s colour was an unseen problem for her, Harry’s royal status - or at least, his perception of it - was shaping up into becoming a problem for him.
‘I didn’t enjoy school at all,’ he admitted. His solution was to act up and act out. ‘I wanted to be the bad boy.’ And he was. He snuck out of school. He drank and smoked. He was abusive. And he dabbled in drugs.
People, whose children were at school with him, claim that he was ‘unpopular with the boys, but the masters cut him some slack, not only because he was a prince - though that was the larger part of the reason - but also because he had lost his mother so tragically. Who could forget that poor little twelve year old walking behind his mother’s coffin with the wreath spelling out Mummy?’
Fortunately for Harry, and to a lesser extent William, at the time of their mother’s death they had a secondary female figure who had already been playing a significant part in their lives since the time of their parents’ separation. Alexandra ‘Tiggy’ Legge-Bourke had been appointed Personal Assistant to the Prince of Wales in 1993, shortly after his separation from Diana. Her brief was simple. She was responsible for the welfare and, to a lesser extent, the entertainment of the two princes when they were in their father’s charge. Although she has frequently been described as having been the nanny, this description is inaccurate. If anything, the old French monarchic description of Gouverneuse to the royal children more accurately captured her status, for she was most decidedly a member of the upper class, which nannies are not. Then twenty eight, her royal credentials were impeccable. Her brother Harry had been a Page of Honour to the Queen between 1985 and 1987. Her maternal grandfather the 3rd Lord Glanusk had been Lord Lieutenant of Brecknockshire during the reign of the Queen’s father King George VI. (Lords Lieutenant are the Monarch’s representatives in the various counties.) Her mother, the Hon. Shân Legge-Bourke had been a lady-in-waiting to the Princess Royal since 1987, had been appointed in 1991 High Sheriff of Powys, and would later be made Lord Lieutenant of Powys, where the family’s 6,000 acre estate Glanusk Park was situated.
Tiggy’s brief was simple. Keep the boys occupied. Having been appointed because she was the embodiment of the aristocratic, no-nonsense, down-to-earth way of doing things, she articulated the difference between her approach and Diana’s: ‘I give them what they need at this stage: fresh air, a rifle, and a horse. She gives them a tennis racket and a bucket of popcorn at the movies.’
Diana had always been jealous of any woman to whom her children warmed. When they became too fond of their nanny Barbara Barnes, she got rid of her with a speed that was truly astonishing to those who did not realise how competitive and possessive she was. However, there was little she could do once it became apparent that both boys ‘adored Tiggy’, as Princess Margaret and her cousin Lady Elizabeth Anson both confirmed.
The Royal Family was delighted that the boys had a more rural female in their lives to counterbalance their metropolitan mother’s influence. Diana tried using Tiggy’s smoking against her, demanding that her sons not be in the same room as she was when she was smoking. This, and other ploys, such as demanding that Tiggy leave the room when she was speaking to her sons on the telephone, failed to weaken Iggy’s hold over the boys, and within the year Diana was obsessing about her.
Ever prone to seeing squiggles where everyone else saw straight lines, Diana told her solicitor Lord Mishcon that ‘Camilla was not really Charles’s lover, but a decoy for his real favourite, the nanny Tiggy Legge-Bourke’, a fact he attested to during Lord Justice Scott Baker’s inquest into Diana’s death in October 2007.
Diana had also recounted this theory to her butler Paul Burrell in a letter she wrote in October 1993, whose contents were entered into evidence during the inquest. She had stated, ‘This particular phase in my life is the most dangerous - my husband is planning “an accident” in my car, brake failure and serious head injury in order to make the path clear for him to marry Tiggy. Camilla is nothing but a decoy, so we are all being used by the man in every sense of the word.’
If, as Diana claimed over a three year period between 1993 and 1996, Charles was really in love with Tiggy and intended to marry her, and Camilla had been nothing but a decoy, that made nonsense of the public’s belief that Diana held Camilla responsible for the breakdown of her marriage. However, because most of the dramas surrounding Tiggy’s supposed role in Charles’s life took place behind palace walls, safely out of sight and hearing of the general public, Camilla never benefited from the anomalies and the public continued to believe that Diana regarded her as the primary threat, when she did not.
By 1995, Diana had become so eaten up with the belief that Tiggy would replace her as Princess of Wales that she managed to convince herself that Charles had impregnated Tiggy. As her Private Secretary Patrick Jephson stated, Diana ‘exulted in accusing Legge-Bourke of having had an abortion.’ Not content to keep this information to herself, her friends, and cohorts, Diana sailed up to Tiggy at the palace Christmas party on the 14th December and said, ‘So sorry about the baby.’ Tiggy was justifiably furious and consulted the celebrated libel lawyer Peter Carter-Ruck. With the Queen’s blessing, he wrote to Diana four days later demanding an apology and retraction. This, together with Diana’s Panorama interview the month before, when she had angled to have the line of succession altered so that her son William instead of Charles would become the next king (she had also written that she believed that the Queen would abdicate the following year, so she was angling to become Regent to the next monarch), proved to be a step too far. On the 20th December, the Queen wrote to both Charles and Diana requiring them to divorce forthwith. This removed the possibility of Diana becoming Regent, even should Charles die and William accede to the throne.
Meanwhile, the public continued to believe that Diana’s comment, in her Panorama interview, that ‘there were three of us in t
he marriage’ referred to Charles, Camilla and herself, when in fact it referred to Charles, Tiggy and herself.
The fallout from Diana’s fall from grace came fast and furious. On the 22nd January 1996, her Private Secretary Patrick Jephson, finding his position untenable now that she had so blotted her copy that she had made her own position untenable, resigned. A day later, so did his assistant, Nicole Cockell. Diana was now a pariah in royal and Establishment circles. By the time the press got hold of the story, she was completely isolated.
Diana had badly overplayed her hand. In doing so, she had lost the sympathy of her most loyal supporters, had alienated the entire Royal Family with the exception of her two children, had also antagonised the Establishment, and found herself so bereft of supporters that she was cold-shouldered in all but her most intimate environments. Thereafter, she would have to play a serious game of catch-up to re-establish herself as a respected and respectable public figure, and by the time of her death had only partially succeeded in retrieving her position. Although the genuine tragedy of her unfortunate end wiped the slate clean, this also provided a whole new host of complications for her children, in particular her younger son.
How much of their mother’s antics Harry and William were aware of as the divorce loomed, is a moot point. It is likely, off Harry’s subsequent statements, that he has never delved deeply into the twists and turns of his parents’ relationship, or of the tenuous nature of many of his mother’s statements and positions.
What is certain, however, is that both Harry and William remained devoted to Tiggy. Indeed, in 1996 William refused to have either of his parents at the Eton Fourth of June celebrations, inviting Tiggy instead. And when Diana died, Tiggy immediately flew to Balmoral to be with the boys. Harry did not leave her side until he left the castle, and, according to Liz Anson, ‘The boys were always welcome at her house in Norfolk. They loved being with Tiggy’s entire family. There were a lot of weekends when the boys were at a loose end after Diana died. They got bored with being at Highgrove and it had a lot of memories of Mummy.’
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