The Royals

by Kitty Kelley

  Afterword

  The Monarchy and the Millennium

  Without the sparkling Princess, the royal family looked as paltry as pensioners doddering into the new century on creaky old bones. The ravages of Diana’s death had left the monarchy moribund, and the Queen’s subjects were reeling with conspiracy theories. Spider webs of foul plots flashed across the internet, darkly suggesting that the Windsors had finally gotten rid of their troublesome Princess so their donkey-eared Prince could marry his mistress. The sinister conjectures, fanned by Mohamed al-Fayed, persisted even after extensive inquests and multimillion-dollar investigations undertaken by France and England ruled out any such possibility.

  Still some who had watched the unraveling of Diana’s marriage over Charles’s affair with Camilla Parker Bowles continued to harbor dark suspicions. They either couldn’t accept the chaotic disaster that had taken the Princess’s life or else they blamed the royal family for depriving her of Scotland Yard’s protection upon her divorce. Evil imaginings were further inflamed when Diana’s butler, Paul Burrell, revealed a letter she had written predicting her violent death at the hands of her husband. The Mirror published the text:

  This particular phase in my life is most dangerous. My husband is planning “an accident” in my car, brake failure and serious injury, to make the path clear for him to marry.

  The mass hysteria that gripped the globe in the wake of Diana’s death melded countries into communities of grief for days on end, uniting disparate people to something mystical and magic that suddenly had been snatched from them. Perhaps it was the hope for a “happily ever after” ending that had been dashed, leaving them feeling bereft in a hopeless world. Years later, psychiatrists and sociologists would continue to try to explain the cataclysm of sorrow that shook the world on that hot August night in Paris, and would compare the global convulsion of mourning to that following the assassination of President Kennedy, and the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

  Diana’s death unleashed a ravenous hunger to know every detail about her short life that was soon filled with a spate of tawdry books the palace rushed to squash. After promising “never to cash in our relationship,” former army major James Hewitt published Love and War, which contained passages from the sixty-four love letters he had received from Diana during his Iraq war service. British newspapers immediately branded “pea brain James” as “a sick cad” and “Major Rat.” During her Panorama interview Diana had admitted her five-year affair with Hewitt. “Yes, I adored him,” she said. “Yes, I was in love with him. But I was very let down.” In that, she proved to be prescient.

  After Hewitt cashed in, Trevor Rees-Jones, the only survivor of the car crash, wrote The Bodyguard’s Story. He had been accused of “incompetence and unprofessional protection” by the Egyptian tycoon Mohamed al-Fayed, who also tried to suppress the book, which said that Diana “could do miles better than this guy [al-Fayed’s son], for Christ’s sake.”

  Six months later, in September 2000, Diana’s former private secretary Patrick Jephson published Shadows of a Princess, which the palace had tried for two years to block. But the former royal retainer, who had signed a confidentiality agreement as a term of his employment, maintained that Diana’s death released him from legal obligations of silence.

  Jephson, whose ancestors had served the monarchy for four hundred years, had worked for Diana for seven during the breakdown of her marriage, and he recalled her as willful, manipulative, and mentally unstable. He wrote that she had taken a string of lovers, smuggled one into Kensington Palace in the trunk of her car, and always traveled with a vibrator for sexual pleasure. He also alluded to her growing paranoia, saying, “She saw plots everywhere.”

  Upon publication of Jephson’s book, Diana’s brother appeared on CNN to denounce the former private secretary as a traitor to the Princess. “He’s not thinking of anything except his bank balance,” said the fuming Earl Spencer, who later enhanced his own bank balance by selling $45 million worth of his family’s treasures to pay for running his estate and for alimony to his ex-wives.

  By this point, Charles Spencer had fallen off his pedestal and was no longer upheld as the standard of loyalty. After his impassioned eulogy, he had moved his wife and four children from England to South Africa to follow his mistress, whom he later dumped for another woman. That woman was soon replaced several times, leading to a messy public divorce, more affairs, another marriage, two more children, further divorce and finally plans for a third marriage. With his tawdry love affairs spread over the British tabloids, the Earl Spencer was dismissed as an “Aristo-Cad.”

  In later years he criticized the Queen and Prince Charles for never visiting Diana’s grave at Althorp, the Spencer estate in Northamptonshire, where he had buried Diana on an island and charged tourists twenty dollars apiece to view her from afar. He complained to the press that he had been frozen out of the lives of William and Harry, who did not attend his second wedding. “I think there is a feeling among those who were never Diana’s supporters [i.e. the royal family] of ‘let’s try to marginalize her and tell people she never mattered and tell people that in that first week in September 1997 they were all suffering from mass hysteria,’ ” he said.

  Publicly perceived as dishonorable, the Earl Spencer was no longer able to defend his sister credibly, so eighteen-year-old Prince William stepped forward and spoke out publicly for the first time. Standing under the oak trees on his father’s Highgrove estate, “Wills,” as Diana had called her blue-eyed son, faced flashing cameras from a hand-picked press corps to express himself about the publication of Patrick Jephson’s book. Disguising his animosity toward the media, whom he blamed for his mother’s death, William said, “Of course, Harry and I are both quite upset about it, that our mother’s trust has been betrayed and that even now she is still being exploited. But, um, I don’t really want to say any more than that.”

  Not even the winsome Prince could stanch the barrage of tell-alls blasting out of Britain from Diana’s former lovers, confidantes, retainers, healers, and psychics. Secret video tapes of her talking about her anguished marriage to Prince Charles were made public. In one tape Diana claims she heard the Queen and Prince Philip discussing whether or not she was mentally ill. On another, she said she heard Philip ask, “How is that mad cow?” She said, “That hurt so much. They never understood or supported me.”

  Two years after the book by her former private secretary came another entitled Diana: Closely Guarded Secret by her former bodyguard Ken Wharfe, who also repeated the Princess’s need to travel with “a little vibrator.” The Queen, according to London newspapers, was “deeply concerned,” “very perturbed,” and “shocked that a royal protection officer should betray a confidence in this way.”

  Her Majesty was in for a bumpy ride. Every day her subjects were being hammered with regular press reports of malfeasance and mismanagement within the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund run by Diana’s sister, Lady Sarah McCorquodale. The fund, which collected over $150 million in Diana’s memory, was dedicated to honoring her with contributions to her favorite charities, plus establishing a monument in the heart of London. But racked by lawsuits, fights, firings, bureaucratic entanglements, and accusations of squandered money, the fund neglected to contribute to Diana’s charities and instead became embroiled in a costly lawsuit against the Franklin Mint for reproducing Diana bride dolls and memorial plates. After six years of litigation, the Franklin Mint won and then countersued the memorial fund for “malicious mischief.” The case was finally settled when the U.K. fund agreed to donate $25 million to several U.S. charities, including $1 million to research obesity in American children—a bizarre tribute to the Princess who suffered from bulimia.

  Shortly before the Queen was to celebrate her golden jubilee—fifty years on the throne—in 2002, her sister, Princess Margaret, died, after suffering from the effects of lung cancer, strokes, phlebitis, and paralysis. She finally succumbed on February 9, 2002, to congestive heart
failure, with her former husband and two children by her bedside. There was no state pomp to bury Margaret, whose quiet funeral was fifty years to the day after the funeral of her beloved father, King George VI, in the same St. George’s Chapel in Windsor. It was assumed that she would want to be buried alongside him, but she had insisted on cremation in Slough, an industrial town a few miles from Windsor Castle. In accordance with her wishes, no friends or family were to be present, only members of her staff and palace officials. She asked that her remains be set to rest in St. George’s Chapel near her father’s. The Times of London called her decision the “final defiance of convention in a life of mold-breaking.”

  A few bouquets were laid outside her residence at Kensington Palace, but Margaret’s public tributes paled next to the tsunami of grief over the death of Diana. Yet no one could doubt which Princess the Queen loved as she stood with her sister’s children in St. George’s Chapel, dabbing tears from her eyes.

  Two years later, in 2004, the British government unsealed documents from the National Archives revealing the “crisis” plans from 1955 in case Margaret had decided to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend, the King’s equerry and a divorced war hero. The documents contained several drafts of a letter to be sent by the Princess to the Queen, asking permission to marry the Royal Air Force hero of World War II and renouncing any claim to the throne. At the time, Margaret was third in the line of succession, after Prince Charles and Princess Anne. But Margaret never sent the letter to her sister. Instead, “conscious of my duty,” she renounced Townsend, the great love of her life. He immediately resigned from the RAF, left England, eventually remarried, and lived the rest of his life in France. Shortly before he died of cancer in 1995 at the age of eighty, he flew to London to say good-bye to Margaret. By then, having been forced to forsake marrying a divorced man, she herself was divorced after a tumultuous marriage of seventeen years.

  The Princess had wed Anthony Armstrong-Jones in 1960 after the Queen had bestowed upon him the title of Lord Snowdon. It was inconceivable then that a royal would marry a commoner and—worse yet—that the daughter of a king and the sister of a queen might give birth to children without titles. Snowdon became an internationally acclaimed photographer but with an eye not always focused on his camera. After many meanderings, his marriage to Margaret ended in divorce in 1978; he remarried shortly thereafter, then divorced a few years later, and remarried again. Sadly, his wandering eye led him to many women in and out of his marriages, and the suicide of a longtime mistress plus the birth of an illegitimate child by another mistress tarred him with notoriety at the end of his life. In 2008, the Daily Mail headlined him as “the Unrepentant Lothario: Lord Snowdon and His Insatiable Appetite for Sex.”

  Going into the millennium, the Queen had told a friend her worst fear was that her mother would die and then her sister. “And I’ll be alone,” she said. Her 101-year-old mother outlived her seventy-one-year-old sister by six weeks, but the desolate monarch carried on with characteristic resolve. She instructed the palace to announce that plans for her golden jubilee would proceed despite the deaths of Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother.

  Amidst the good wishes Britons showered on their seventy-six-year-old queen in 2002, scandal poured from the palace like a hard rain on parched tabloids. The most sordid storm erupted over the arrest and trial of Diana’s beloved butler, Paul Burrell, her supposed “rock,” who was accused of stealing 342 items from her residence, including some of her nightgowns and designer dresses, which he reportedly was wearing to private parties. Police raided Burrell’s house and confiscated several items, including clothes, CDs and LPs signed by Diana, photo albums, and personal letters to the Princess from Mother Teresa and the Queen Mother.

  Shortly after Diana’s death, the Queen had honored Paul Burrell’s twenty-one years of service to the royal family by awarding him the Royal Victorian Medal—the highest accolade a monarch can bestow upon a servant. The Queen was grateful to him for flying to Paris immediately after the crash to dress the Princess’s body and apply her makeup before Prince Charles met her coffin and had it flown home. Burrell kept the clothes Diana had died in and stored them in his freezer before burning them a few weeks later.

  The Spencers, also grateful at the time, asked the butler to join the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund to help with fund-raising, and he worked every day with Diana’s sister, cataloguing the Princess’s possessions at Kensington Palace.

  During that time he made several public appearances, pronouncing “loyalty and trust” as “the most essential qualities.” He gave interviews, saying, “I don’t think I’ll ever get over her death. Nothing can replace that void.” His public stance began to jar some members of the board, who felt he was too eager to be in the spotlight. “He would dearly love to be more of a media personality,” said Andrew Purkis, the fund’s chief executive. The board strenuously objected when the butler posed for pictures at Kensington Palace for a profile in Majesty magazine. At that point he resigned and months later rankled board members by signing a book contract for Entertaining with Style, which Diana’s family saw as rank exploitation. On August 16, 2001, police raided his house, and he was arrested on three counts of theft.

  Burrell pleaded not guilty, and his trial was set to begin in the Old Bailey in January 2002, but Her Majesty’s court postponed the date so as not to interfere with Her Majesty’s jubilee celebration. Rescheduled for October 2002, the butler’s trial unearthed more dirty Diana laundry than almost all the tell-alls combined. Prince Charles was reported as telling friends he did not want Burrell to be prosecuted because he was afraid Princes William and Harry would be dragged into the trial. The government was made aware of these objections and neither Charles nor his sons were called to appear.

  For nine days Britain watched the trial coverage and its rising tide of lurid allegations, including homosexual rape among Prince Charles’s staff. There were also accusations of tax fraud on the part of certain royal retainers who worked for Charles and secretly accepted gifts without declaring them. As a prosecution witness, Diana’s sister, Sarah, and their mother, Frances Shand Kydd, testified against Burrell, saying he had misinterpreted Diana’s reliance on him as a “rock.” Mrs. Shand Kydd admitted she and Diana had not spoken for many months before the Princess died but denied it was because she had criticized her daughter’s affairs with Muslim men. Diana was further incensed when her mother sold an interview to Hello! magazine in which she said she disapproved of her daughter’s divorce. Mrs. Shand Kydd said she had accepted payment for the interview only to raise money for one of her charities.

  Under cross-examination, Burrell’s lawyer got Diana’s mother to admit having shredded many of the Princess’s documents at Kensington Palace, and the lawyer said Burrell had rushed in to save them. A letter from Charles Spencer rejecting Diana’s request to seek refuge at Althorp after her divorce was revealed. The butler later said Diana had wept as she read her brother’s letter and sobbed when he accused her of being mentally unstable. The Earl Spencer had also demanded Diana return the family’s diamond tiara, which she had borrowed for her wedding. She did return it, leaving the jeweled crown in a cardboard box to be picked up at the back door of Kensington Palace.

  The butler’s trial illuminated the crass self-entitlement of the British class system when he testified that someone within the Spencer family had told him, the son of a truck driver, “Just remember where you came from.” By then the Spencers, once one of England’s most illustrious families, looked like spiteful, snobbish, arrogant aristocrats, who treated commoners like cattle. The Windsors did not look much better. The trial was tarnishing “the good and the great,” who took curtsies as their due.

  Estimated to have cost $2.5 million, the proceedings suddenly collapsed on the ninth day just as the butler was to take the stand in his own defense. Chambers quickly adjourned and the jury was dismissed minutes after Prince Charles’s lawyer contacted the police to say that Her Majesty had jus
t recalled that Burrell, her former footman, had once mentioned to her that he had taken away some of Diana’s possessions for safekeeping. Hearing that it was the Queen herself—who headed the government by divine right—vouching for the butler, the trial was terminated with Burrell’s acquittal. The prosecution knew there was nothing further to be discussed, no more evidence to be weighed, no arguments to be heard. The Crown had spoken and the prosecution’s chance to convict was gone. In this case, the Queen not only reigned, she ruled.

  The butler stood next to his solicitor on the steps of the Old Bailey, nearly in tears. “The Queen came through for me,” he said, visibly shaken. His father, also vastly relieved, told the BBC: “It’s been a nightmare. At one point [Paul] was talking about ending it because he couldn’t cope.”

  The forty-four-year-old former royal retainer, unemployed for the two years he fought his case, soon found his focus and shot his spleen into the establishment. “The attempt… to destroy my reputation with my trial has led me to [write A Royal Duty],” Burrell said of his tell-all book about working for the Princess of Wales.

  Without naming names, he recounted Diana’s many lovers [nine] including an Oscar-winning Hollywood actor, a sports legend, a leading musician, a famous politician, a novelist, a lawyer, and a billionaire businessman. He said her only real love after her divorce was the dashing heart surgeon Hasnat Khan, whom she had wanted to marry but who had refused because he was Muslim. The butler savaged the Spencers, referring to Diana’s sister as “McCrocodile,” and quoting from Charles Spencer’s letter blasting the Princess for “the consternation and hurt” her “fickle friendship” had caused so many. “[The Spencers] said I was becoming too big for my boots,” Burrell told reporters. “I was a servant. I should know my place. I should never assume to be more than that. Why do you think the Princess had such an affinity with American culture? She was planning to move to California. She was buying a property on the West Coast in Malibu, the former home of Julie Andrews.”