by Kitty Kelley
When the Prime Minister made that announcement, he looked like a man at a funeral forced to deliver the eulogy. His words had been crafted by the Queen’s lawyers and courtiers to convey sad news without quite telling the truth. Despite the public reassurances, the couple did plan to divorce, their decision was not amicable, and their constitutional positions were affected. The Queen and Duke of Edinburgh were not saddened: they were incensed. And they did not understand or sympathize. Rather, they believed that the marriage should continue, no matter how miserable, for the sake of the monarchy.
Television programs were preempted on December 9, 1992, to carry the Prime Minister’s statement, and when he rose to speak, the House of Commons fell strangely silent. Afterward the fiery Labor MP Dennis Skinner said, “The royal family has just pushed the self-destruct button.” He was immediately barraged by indignant shouts. But he continued: “It is high time we stopped this charade of swearing allegiance to the Queen and her heirs and successors, because we don’t know from time to time who they are…. The reigning Queen could possibly be the last.”
The Prime Minister bristled. “You do not, I believe, speak for the nation or any significant part of it.”
But the Prime Minister was wrong. After his announcement, polls showed that three out of four Britons believed the House of Windsor was crumbling.
The Queen, who was at Sandringham, did not watch the announcement on television; she was walking her dogs. When she returned, her page was waiting to offer his sympathy. She nodded briskly and said, “I think you’ll find it’s all for the best.”
Charles was more forthcoming with his staff at Highgrove. “I feel a surging sense of relief,” he told them. He had already started refurbishing the rooms that Diana had vacated. He ordered all the belongings she had not taken with her to be burned, including some of the children’s old toys. On top of the bonfire was a carved wooden rocking horse that had been a birthday gift to Prince William from the President of the United States and Mrs. Reagan.
After the Prime Minister’s announcement, reporters descended on Camilla Parker Bowles’s manor home in Wiltshire, but she feigned ignorance about the Waleses’ separation. “Obviously, if something has gone wrong, I’m very sorry for them,” she said. “But I know nothing more than the average person in the street. I only know what I see on television.” Fifty miles away, her husband emerged from his London apartment. The couple, who had been married nineteen years, lived apart quietly and saw each other only on rare weekends. When reporters asked his reaction, Andrew Parker Bowles kept walking. “Like everyone else,” he said, “one feels sad about this.” He scolded a reporter for suggesting that his wife had been instrumental in the breakup.
“No, it’s not true,” he said. “How many times do I have to spell it out? Those stories are pure fiction.”
Some people on the street told reporters they felt betrayed. “The royal family is supposed to be better than us,” said one middle-aged woman. “They’re supposed to show us the way to behave. Otherwise, what’s their purpose?”
Reaction split down generations. Those who had spent childhood nights huddled in London’s underground during World War II looked to royalty as a beacon. But those who grew up listening to the Beatles, not to the bombs, viewed the royal family as a relic. To the postwar generations, especially those reared on video games, the monarchy just looked plain silly. One nineteen-year-old student from Liverpool said, “Just a bunch of out-of-date, out-of-touch richies.”
But the royalist, Lord St. John of Fawsley, disagreed. He rationalized that the royal family was emblematic of the modern dysfunctional family. Next to the United States, the United Kingdom had the highest rate of divorce in the Western world, which was reflected in its royal family. “For this century the monarchy has been held up as an example of family rectitude,” he said with a straight face. “Well, that can’t go on. So the royal family will have to adapt itself to new circumstances. In some ways it will be nearer to the people because it will be sharing the family problems all of us have faced.”
No dynasty had taught its subjects more emphatically to shrink from divorce—and no dynasty had given them more from which to shrink. Yet by 1992 all the monarch’s married children were legally separated and headed for divorce. “Great weddings,” observed writer Valerie Grove, “too bad about the marriages.”
Half the country now believed that by the end of the twentieth century the monarchy would be finished and that Britain would not suffer. The press reflected the public’s sentiments. “Charles will not be King,” predicted the Sun, “Di will not be Queen.” The Daily Mirror said: “The latest royal mess is making a mockery of the monarchy. Unchecked, that mockery will destroy the monarchy itself.”
Measured against people’s expectations, Charles had fallen alarmingly far. Even Tory members of Parliament debated his right to the throne. Fearing a constitutional crisis, he called his friend Arnold, Lord Goodman for advice. The eminent lawyer said that a divorce would not prevent him from becoming King—but a second marriage would. So Charles said he did not intend to remarry. He maintained stoutly, “I will be the next King.”
The separation had international repercussions. In Germany wax museums moved the mannequins of Charles and Diana suitably apart. In Australia the government dropped all references to Queen Elizabeth II from its oath of allegiance. In Britain Labor MP Anthony Benn introduced a bill to abolish the monarchy. He suggested replacing the Queen with an elected president, separating church and state, and giving Wales and Scotland their own Parliaments. The Benn bill was never debated, but people who cared about monarchy were concerned.
From the United States, Prince Philip’s onetime Hollywood press agent offered his services. Henry Rogers of Rogers & Cowan had orchestrated the publicity for Philip’s 1966 trip to Los Angeles. The two men had met on the recommendation of Philip’s Hollywood pal Frank Sinatra, a client of Rogers & Cowan. Now, twenty-six years later, Rogers offered to come out of retirement to help again. Philip thanked him in a handwritten letter from Windsor Castle:
Dear Henry,
Life appears to have changed out of all recognition. Whoever first said, “It never rains, but it pours” made a very profound statement!! So much happened at once and as bad luck would have it, it all took place against the sombre backdrop of the recession.
In spite of the dramatic media, we have had tremendous support through the mail from people of all kinds. I have every hope that things will get better this year.
But thank you all the same for generously offering your help….
The royal family appeared calm and tried to hold firm, especially the Queen Mother. She knew the country had survived bad kings, mad kings, weak kings, dumb kings, homosexual kings, even foreign-born kings. At the age of ninety-two she was not so acute as she had once been, but she was determined to help Charles, her favorite grandchild, achieve what she saw as his destiny. For she was a king maker. In her time she had rammed steel down the spine of her weak husband and made him look strong to his subjects. Now she longed to do the same for her beleaguered grandson.
But she opposed divorce—so much so that she would not let Charles move in with her after the separation as he waited for his apartment in St. James’s Palace to be renovated. The Queen Mother had been reared during an era when divorce spelled social disgrace, and she remained convinced that the only real threat to the monarchy was divorce. She tolerated all kinds of deviant behavior in her family, from alcoholism to drug addiction. But she did not countenance divorce. She said that was the death blow to family stability, which she felt the House of Windsor must represent to survive. She resisted attending Princess Anne’s second wedding in Scotland because she did not want to pay tribute to another divorce in the royal family. Despite her reservations, she eventually relented.
She dismissed those who said the monarchy was in crisis because royalty had stepped off the throne to marry commoners like Sarah Ferguson and Diana Spencer. As the most exemplary common
er of them all, the Queen Mother naturally disagreed with that. She said the problem was divorce and that Sarah and Diana were “unsuitable” because they were the children of divorce.
Both Sarah and Diana had grown up with mothers who had run off from their homes and abandoned their families to seek happiness with other men. Neither Sarah nor Diana had seen a marriage grow into a lifetime partnership that overcame adversity and boredom. Instead both had watched their mothers place personal satisfaction before duty and responsibility. To the Queen Mother, those were the hallmarks of royalty. Now the daughters were following their mothers’ wayward footsteps by breaking their marriage vows. In doing so, they were betraying crown and country.
“You take in two girls from broken homes,” the Queen had said, “and look how they repay you.”
The Queen Mother agreed. She blamed Diana especially for allowing the world to see the “sordid” misery of her marriage. The Queen Mother had used that word in talking to her grandson. Charles had warned her about his wife’s “instability” and her “confounded unreasonableness,” but the Queen Mother was unprepared for Diana’s unholy disclosures.
“The bulimia… the business of overeating and then vomiting—that thoroughly revolted her,” said one of the Queen Mother’s friends. “The image of the future Queen of England riding the porcelain chariot was, well… I’m afraid she couldn’t get beyond the picture of the Princess of Wales crouched over a toilet bowl purging herself of puddings by throwing up.”
“A traitor entered our house,” the Queen Mother told Ruth Fermoy, her lady-in-waiting. Lady Fermoy agreed, but sadly—the “traitor” was her own granddaughter.
“Flesh and blood and family count for little when you’re a royalist,” said Ruth Fermoy’s goddaughter, “and Ruth was a royalist to her core. She turned on Diana when she separated from Charles, whom she absolutely adored. She said it was the saddest day in her life. Despite what has been written about her and the Queen Mother engineering the marriage, Ruth told me that she didn’t want Diana to marry Charles. She had warned her at the time of what she would encounter by joining the royal family. But Diana was helplessly in love and assured Grandma Ruth, as she called her, that she wanted to dedicate her life to Charles….
“Diana mended things a little before Ruth died—but just. I was there when she visited Ruth’s flat in Eaton Square for the last time, and I felt sad for her when she left because Ruth said she still didn’t forgive Diana for what she had done.
“But then neither did Diana’s mother. She [Frances Shand Kydd] told me, and these were her exact words: ‘I know Charles has hurt Diana terribly, but I love him and I refuse to take sides.’ That’s from Diana’s own mother.
“And as for the Queen Mother… well, she unleashed her dogs, and it’s been bloody hell for Diana ever since.”
In public, the Queen Mother, who avoided any unpleasantness, never snarled, barked, or growled. For that, she “unleashed her dogs,” who were the emissaries she designated to communicate her opinions to the press. She, like her daughter, insisted on maintaining the myth of never granting interviews, although both talked to favored writers. After the Prime Minister’s announcement about the separation, Lord Wyatt stepped forward to comment on the behavior of the Princess of Wales.
He was identified as “a close personal friend of the Queen Mother,” so readers of the Sunday Times were expected to know whose sentiments were being expressed:
Princess Diana could never have won a university place, but she won a prince and failed to keep him. She is addicted to the limelight her marriage brought. It’s like a drug; to feed her craving she will do anything, even if it meant destroying the throne she solemnly swore to uphold.
Within weeks Diana was portrayed as a woman more sinned against than sinning. A transcript of her husband’s intimate telephone conversation with his mistress was published on January 12, 1993. The secret recording, known as Camillagate, was made on December 18, 1989, a few days before the secret recording of Diana’s telephone conversation with James Gilbey, known as Squidgygate. Both conversations had been picked up by men, both hobbyists who claimed they scanned the airwaves in their spare time like ham radio operators. But those who tend to conspiracies hinted at something more sinister: they said that publishing transcripts three years after the conversations were recorded suggested more than mere coincidence. They speculated that the furtive interceptions had been carried out by Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, MI5, to embarrass the royal family and destabilize the monarchy.
The embarrassment was profound. In the words of one writer, the public was “well and truly shocked” to hear the prospective Supreme Governor of the Church of England declare his passion for another man’s wife. “I want to feel my way along you, all over you and up and down you and in and out… particularly in and out,” Charles told Camilla. “I’ll just live inside your trousers or something. It would be much easier….”
During the late night conversation, Charles proposed living inside Camilla as “a Tampax,” which she found delightful. “Oh, what a wonderful idea,” she exclaimed. He paused. “My luck to be chucked down a lavatory and go on forever swirling around the top, never going down.” Sounding enthralled, she said she wanted him day and night… “desperately, desperately, desperately….”
The day the transcript was published, reporters surrounded Camilla’s home. When she heard why they were there, she was stunned. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it,” she said. “I must speak to my husband. He is on his way home.” She closed the door and took the phone off the hook.
“6 Min Love Tape Could Cost Charles Throne” shrieked the Sun, but the London Evening Standard asked, “So What’s Wrong with a King Who Can Talk Dirty?” Charles said he was “appalled” by the publication of his private conversation and called friends to apologize for embarrassing them. They deplored publication of a private conversation that was taped, duplicated, sold, and printed in transcript form. “You might argue Charles and Camilla deserve the embarrassment,” said his biographer Penny Junor, “but surely not their children.”
Already nine-year-old Wills had been reported fighting with classmates at school, where he shoved a boy’s head down the toilet. Deeply depressed by his parents’ quarreling, he locked himself in the bathroom for hours, and his grades slumped. His younger brother, Harry, was seen sneaking cigarettes at school. Both children sucked their thumbs and wet their beds. Thomas Parker Bowles, the teenage son of Camilla and Andrew, was arrested for possession of drugs. He was not threatened with suspension from Oxford because he was off campus when apprehended by police for possession of cannabis and ecstasy pills. To escape the gibes of students, he began calling himself Tom Bowles. He did not admit that his middle name was Charles in honor of his godfather, the Prince of Wales.
Although the tabloid press condemned Charles as a knave, he found compassion in unexpected quarters: Peter McKay wrote in the London Evening Standard that the six-minute phone call was “silly, touching and filthy… [but it] made me think better of Charles…. He comes out of it as a daft romantic, dying to leap under the duvet, fond of terrible sex jokes.” The novelist Fay Weldon said she thought the transcript was moving. “What it’s got to do with Charles being King I don’t know. My opinion of him goes up no end because it shows he has some proper emotions….”
But most of the country was disgusted, and the next time he appeared in public, he was booed. At an official engagement, a man in the crowd shouted: “Have you no shame?” Opinion polls showed that only one in three Britons felt Charles was entitled to become King. Uncharacteristically, the English treated him like a politician, who could be deprived of his position because of his negative image. His friend and former equerry, Nicholas Soames, hastened to spell out the hereditary principle involved in succession. He explained that Charles’s right to the throne did not depend on his popularity: barring abdication or an act of Parliament, Charles was not disposable. “The throne is his duty, his obligati
on, his destiny,” said Soames. “It’s not something he seeks, but it will be his…. Twelve hundred years of British history are not going to be overturned by Mr. Murdoch’s republican press, engaged in a circulation war. The heir to the throne will be the next King, and that’s all there is to it.”
Another close friend said: “It was a terrible moment, the worst moment of his life…. He wanted to be taken seriously. He sincerely believed he had important things to say. And in six minutes of private conversation, a conversation that was nobody’s business but his and the woman to whom he was speaking, his reputation was ruined…. He really didn’t deserve to be destroyed so publicly and so cruelly.”
Even the far-off Fiji Islands were upset. The government announced it would discontinue celebrating Charles’s birthday as a national holiday because he no longer represented greatness to them. In Australia the Prime Minister’s wife would not curtsy to him, and the Deputy Prime Minister suggested that he not be invited to open the Olympics in the year 2000. “Let’s have Prince William do it—anybody but his father.”
If Charles had chosen one act, short of child molestation, he could not have alienated his future subjects more. Through The Prince’s Trust he had established one of the country’s biggest charities to benefit disadvantaged children, but no amount of grants to inner-city youngsters could make him look princely now. As his biographer Anthony Holden put it, “No one listens to do-gooding sermons from a man who is two-timing the world’s most desirable woman.”
Shaken by the crisis, Charles summoned six friends to Sandringham to advise him. Afterward one man was dispatched to tell the Telegraph that the Prince was prepared to make any sacrifice to insure his succession to the throne. The headline on the next day’s front page: “Prince of Wales Chooses the Celibate Life.”
The attempt to win back public confidence did not work. Nothing could stop the sniggering jokes. “That’ll be one pack of Charlie’s,” sang a London grocery clerk, ringing up a box of sanitary napkins. A cartoonist drew Charles’s face as an egg cup with yolk dribbling down his nose. Greeting cards appeared with his caricature: “For your birthday, I’d like to treat you to a Chuck and Di margarita. It’s cold, frosty, and it’s on the rocks.” The Palace finally intervened to prevent a safe-sex poster from appearing on British billboards. The proposed advertisement had shown a wedding picture of the Prince and Princess of Wales kissing on the balcony of Buckingham Palace in front of huge crowds. The caption read “Appearances Can Be Deceptive. Use a Johnny Condom.” A spokesman for the British Safety Council resented the Palace interference: “We really could not care less what the royals think,” said Fiona Harcombe. “The benefits far outweigh the offense it might cause to the Queen.”