There has been much speculation about the Princess’s interest in spiritual matters in general and in the Roman Catholic Church in particular. The story of the Westminster Cathedral engagement perhaps provides an illustrative introduction to the subject, and one which shows the Princess in a particularly good light.
From that visit to Westminster Cathedral, undertaken on behalf of somebody else and in its content and style not really to her taste, grew a link with an unsung charity working with people in desperate need. It was a link which the Princess followed up with minimal publicity, but with considerable personal interest and financial support. Some years later, as administrator of her Charities Trust, I made a very substantial donation on her instructions to one of the Cardinal’s charities. It was perhaps her single most selfless act of charity that I encountered. Moreover, its message was particularly welcome. Despite the superficiality of much of her charity involvement – however diligently performed – there were exceptions that proved the rule. The Cardinal’s quiet but practical holiness made a deep impression on her and she would have given a great deal to be able to emulate it, and to know the peace of mind that was its reward.
The visit to the Cathedral was still very much in my mind when, after an illness of great suffering, my father died of cancer. I came back from the hospital after a night at his bedside, filled with every sort of confused emotion and utterly exhausted. In the immediate aftermath of his death my brother and stepmother and I were numbed with shock, which I suppose is grief’s merciful anaesthetic. As they began the practical business of informing relatives and arranging the funeral, I sat in my father’s garden in the early-morning Hampshire sunshine.
In my hand I carried my office-issue mobile phone, in those days the size of a small breeze block. Like so many before and after me, in a moment of deep personal anguish the thought of telling the Princess of Wales about it was somehow soothing. As my boss, I knew her well enough to understand that she could not enlighten me about the meaning of life, or life after death, or the purpose of suffering. Instead, I perceived that the comfort she gave came less from the person she was than from the permission she somehow gave that would allow me to begin to grieve. That is the best I can do to describe what I felt as I sat on the grass and tried to form in my mind the words that I would use when I spoke to her.
Another way of looking at it might be to say that she had the gift of creating a neutral, safe space between herself and whoever she was talking to, into which that person’s fears and hopes could be safely placed. She could not heal suffering any more than a priest can forgive sin, but the analogy is perhaps not so outrageous if you consider that providence finds recruits in the most unlikely places, even palaces.
When I eventually spoke to her, therefore, the words for once came from the heart and so, I believe, did her reply. Afterwards I realized that the comfort and strength I had undoubtedly received did not come from the Princess herself, but equally I realized that without her I might have searched and searched and not found that comfort at all, while all the time my sadness sank slowly and painfully into the darkness of my mind.
That incident marked another small milestone in my relationship with the Princess. Death being no respecter of social status, it had enabled us to communicate with a rare equality. It was a level of communication that would return often in the years ahead, but especially at times of crisis for her, not least following the death of her own father.
Here was yet another sign of the Princess’s potential: time and again, good was achieved through her mere involvement. At a subconscious level, I believe she was aware of the virtue of what she was doing – not just for the Cardinal’s charity or for me, but in all her humanitarian work – but it was done by instinct rather than as a formalized response to any structured religious influence on her life. Sadly, she did not feel the happiness she deserved from the good work she did. The compassion she showed others was too often just compensation for the attention she seemed to feel she had always been denied herself. In addition, because she was a catalyst rather than a direct cause of good, she did not develop the disciplined thinking necessary for spiritual growth, or feel the satisfaction that might have been of solid benefit to her in return.
I think it was an instinctive need to redress this imbalance that led her to seek spiritual answers from her various therapists and astrologers – but they demanded little in the way of disciplined thinking either, or if they did, their services were quickly dispensed with. Maybe that was why she made so little progress with her occasional signs of interest in acquiring more formal religious knowledge. She preferred to find her religion in other people and, like some other royal travellers, took special comfort from encountering particular shining examples on her journey.
Certainly the Cardinal made a very deep impression on her that day at Westminster Cathedral, not just as a tall and reassuring companion in the public eye, but also as the embodiment of a life devoted to the welfare of others, uncluttered by all the demands of the world to which she felt victim. ‘That man,’ she commented later, ‘he’s so holy – and just like a great big teddy bear. I love his ears!’
However cynical, manipulative or self-indulgent her motives might sometimes have been for doing some of the good things for which she received such credit, in the act of doing them there was no cynicism at all. I saw the same transient sincerity in her exaggerated thanks and huge output of notes expressing warm appreciation. People who had no knowledge of her other than as recipients of her concern or gratitude were in no doubt about what they felt she gave to them. It is the same quality we can see even now, years later, in contemporary news photographs of the Princess doing her routine work of bringing hope and comfort to people in need. It was given and received at a level beyond speech and I do not think it can ever be explained properly in simply human terms.
In my time with her, however, she never found the faith that might have given her strength in moments of real doubt and loneliness. It was probably the only way in which she could have gained genuine satisfaction and happiness from the good that was so often laid at her door. Here, perhaps, was the greatest lost potential of all. The Princess’s quest for personal fulfilment grew increasingly desperate. In the absence of a solid faith that could comfort her, she took refuge in impulsive bouts of mysticism and psychology. Without a reliable framework of knowledge and support, or wise guidance she was prepared to trust, these too were bound to fail her.
TEN
ROSES
I was right in thinking that the Princess’s triumph in Pakistan would not win much acclaim in Palace corridors back home. The reason, perhaps, was that foreign tours were traditionally not popular with royal people. Aware that all-expenses-paid trips to exotic destinations might be misinterpreted as frivolous jaunts, we tended to portray overseas tours as stern duties to be stoically endured. There was plenty of evidence to justify such a view, given the real discomfort and inconvenience these expeditions usually involved. The sight of the Princess apparently enjoying film-star status against exotic backdrops was at odds with this established image, and it did not seem to sit easily with the often unglamorous reality of routine diplomacy and British trade promotion which lay at the heart of traditional royal tour programmes.
Having won the popularity contest at home, was this media-hungry young woman now going to turn her superficial charm on foreign audiences? I could hear the unspoken question – followed in my imagination by a rather thin-lipped resolve to stand back and watch how long it would take her to slip up on her self-imposed solo high-wire act.
My attitude was overly cynical, as I can see in retrospect. Nobody uttered such comments, at least not in my hearing. It was also true, however, that nobody in the Palace uttered much in the way of appreciation to the Princess herself, and she felt its absence – especially from her in-laws – more keenly than they might have suspected.
Over time, as she obstinately refused to fall off her high wire, the abundance of recognition
she received from all other directions only accentuated their reticence. This in turn roused her competitive instincts and each new tour became a test of her ability to outshine the last. This was the unwelcome, and largely avoidable, outcome of letting her feel that she was slipping from the irksome but reassuring embrace of royal comradeship. Being royal is, after all, one of the loneliest jobs in the world and mutual support must be vital. I knew they would not change – royal people do not – and I knew also, without a doubt, that the Princess’s world was going to change very soon indeed.
Meanwhile, duty was beginning to take second place to star quality as the guiding principle in the Princess’s public image and in her personal motivation. As if to challenge her nearest and dearest, she worked hard and thrived on it. Almost every day the familiar Jaguar, with three outriders and a police back-up car, would sweep out of Kensington Palace.
The little convoy passed quickly beneath the unseeing lenses of tourists craning to get a picture of what they imagined might be her bedroom window, oblivious of the real Princess passing within inches at child’s-eye level. Usually it was the children who spotted her first, tugging at the sleeve of a parent determinedly pointing the family Pentax at the palace facade.
If the adult responded quickly enough, and stooped to peer through the car window, he might catch a fleeting glimpse of the famous profile and even earn himself a quick wave in the process. If he saw her lips move, it was no more informative than watching a fish in an aquarium – silent behind the glass she could say anything she liked and often did.
‘Patrick! My God! Why do men that shape insist on wearing tartan trousers? And did you see that child’s snotty nose? Hello! Hello!’ she would mouth. ‘Goodbye … Ooh! He’s rather dishy!’
‘Shall we drop you here, Ma’am? We could always pick you up on the way back.’
‘Ha ha, Patrick. Look, there’s one for you … God! What an old dog … Hello [cheesy smile] … Oh look! It’s Princess Margaret’s chauffeur [lowers window] … Hello Griffin! How’s the cold? I hope you’re feeling better [said with genuine feeling] … Goodbye …’
Her powers of observation were phenomenal. Even the sharp-eyed PPO riding in the front seat would sometimes be slower than the Princess to spot a familiar face in a crowd or walking along the pavement. The pedestrians of Kensington High Street might have been astonished by the royal scrutiny so often directed at them from the back of the anonymous-looking Jaguar.
On other occasions it was motorists who were picked up on her constantly scanning sensors. One day, returning from a light shopping expedition to Marks and Spencer and her regular chat with the news vendor outside the tube station, she spotted the venerable journalist Sir John Junor’s Range Rover stationary in the traffic. Seeing a rare opportunity to score a point, she dodged across the road to surprise him.
Never her natural ally – and instinctively more prone to extol her husband at her expense – the doyen of columnists was momentarily flabbergasted to find the Princess of Wales cheerily greeting him through the window. Her immediate success was evident in his subsequent description of the encounter – ‘charming’ – and he never again employed his acerbic pen against her.
I complimented her on her initiative, but, with an increasingly familiar flash of worldliness, she was dismissive. ‘They can’t cope with the real thing,’ she replied coolly. ‘They’re all the same. Haven’t the guts to tell you to your face.’
She was right, I reflected, uncomfortably aware that the same accusation could often have been levelled at me. On the other hand, I thought, brightening up, she was no mean character assassin herself.
Symbolically, at the opening of the decade that would see her divorce, the familiar territory of her marriage and early royal years was becoming increasingly foreign to the Princess and she set out to identify herself with surroundings that gave the greatest possible contrast to her previous image. The time of transition was moving inexorably towards a time of unalterable change.
This was when it began to become clearer to the watching world – and to her lurking critics – that she was setting her own path, well before the solo triumph in Pakistan. Although she was, as we have seen, still an expert at mainstream, conventional royal events, from 1990 onwards her growing talent lay in giving them a new twist. Even when this was unconscious or even accidental, the event in question was indelibly marked by her involvement.
Hospitals, for example, are traditional royal territory, but not hospitals for the criminally insane – as became obvious from the media reaction when the Princess started visiting them. There was much lurid speculation about which depraved killers she was doubtless going to meet. The fact that she met no criminal ‘celebrities’ during any of her visits did not deter a regular accompaniment of ‘beauty and the beast’ tabloid stories. The Princess was not deterred either. I sometimes allowed myself the uncharitable thought that beauties generally look at their best alongside beasts anyway.
So it was that one day we found ourselves driving through the gates of Rampton Hospital, home of some of the most notorious, criminally insane inmates in the country. I often wondered about the attraction of these institutions to the Princess. If nothing else, visits to such forbidding places demonstrated a rare commitment to the cause – though whether the cause was the public one of helping to support her charity Turning Point or some private one of her own was never quite certain, not even in her own mind.
For no very obvious reason, however, there was one thing she was sure about. ‘The poor patients in these places,’ she said, ‘they’re all brutalized by the staff!’ Subsequent scandals at Rampton made this a remarkably prescient comment, but at the time I thought it showed a curious readiness to identify with the perceived victim. It offered a remarkable insight into her view of the world, in that she could apparently disregard the proven ability of most of these ‘victims’ to inflict more brutality on others than they would ever experience themselves in the hospital.
With the Princess I eventually visited all of the Special Hospital Authority’s establishments, some of them such as Broadmoor more than once. The crimes amassed by their inmates would have had the most seasoned tabloid editor reaching for his dictionary of hyperbole. Hearing the great security gates clang behind her never failed to send a frisson of forbidden pleasure down the Princess’s back. It was like a modern version of going to watch the inmates of Bedlam. Every raw emotion, every extreme of human behaviour, was represented behind these high walls. It was the ultimate vicarious shock-trip.
Such sentiments would have been deeply offensive to the professional and compassionate men and women who ran such institutions and who, over the years, I came to admire and respect greatly. They would also, no doubt, have deeply offended most of the patients we came to visit, whose attempts to rehabilitate themselves and return to normal life pushed most royal problems – and my own – into the shade.
At Rampton the Princess spent most of her time in the women’s wing. The wards we went into were suspiciously tidy, the floors polished, the paintwork fresh, the seat covers unstained, the lavatories unswamped, the air unthick with cigarettes, fried food and BO. The patients themselves, for the most part, sat around in attitudes of resignation.
Visiting a craft lesson, the Princess saw young women patients drawing cards for Mother’s Day. Doing our best to impede the other hangers-on who tended to crowd closer than she liked, we left her to walk among the patients unescorted. Here and there she sat down and spoke for a while with girls no older than herself, but whose faces bore the mark of years in the grip and company of dreadful things.
As usual, the best way of judging the Princess’s effect on people was to look not at those to whom she was speaking but at those to whom she had spoken some minutes before. These women were under instructions to carry on with their work, not least because of my insistence on the recce that everything should look as uncontrived as possible. At the tables she had already visited, however, further work was impossible. T
he girls whispered to each other about their impressions, giggling and snatching further furtive glances. Others just stared mesmerized and not always adoringly at the retreating figure who had visited them from another world.
One girl at a table close to me just let her head drop. Silent tears ran down her cheeks and her half-finished card lay abandoned on the table in front of her. In large, irregular letters I read the message, ‘A mum is someone who loves you no matter what you’ve done.’
We were a very subdued little group as the helicopter flew us back to the real world of Kensington Palace. The Princess retreated into her corner seat and flicked unseeingly through magazines. I had never known her so withdrawn.
As the Wessex whirred and clattered low over Notting Hill, I formed a theory about what I was seeing in the Princess’s reaction to the sights of the day. There ought to be a name for the condition, suffered by many royal people, which is brought on by repeated exposure to other people’s good works. Its symptoms are a fixed expression of deep concern and an inner feeling of profound uselessness. Cure is almost unknown, since quarantine – the only effective treatment – would put too many people out of business.
Away from such radical and emotionally demanding engagements, the Princess continued to excel at rather more traditional royal duties. Even then, however, she could increasingly be expected to transform them with personal touches and minor deviations from standard royal practice, vividly illustrated by a visit she undertook to the Royal Hampshire Regiment on duty in Northern Ireland.
Although she became less and less enthusiastic about conventional royal work, she was generally easier to persuade when asked to visit either of the two British Army regiments for which she had the honorary title of Colonel-in-Chief. For one thing, Army officers held a special appeal for her, and for another, such engagements could provide excellent publicity, a fact which was certainly borne out on this occasion.
Shadows of a Princess Page 24