by John Pearson
Who better for this role than innocent Diana? She seemed to possess almost all the qualities that had made Queen Alexandra so beloved by her children - and so invaluable to her husband and his mistresses. Even Diana’s innocence seemed in her favour, and the Prince presumably believed that this gentle, unformed, girl could easily be led towards the role that he envisaged. She had been working in a kindergarten and loved children. She also loved the Prince. Once she was Princess of Wales and mother of the royal children, she would have far too much to lose to make trouble over her husband’s friendship with Camilla, which need never threaten her or endanger her position as future Queen of England.
Ironically, it was Diana’s apparent perfection for the role of royal bride that caused such endless trouble later. For she seemed to offer such irresistible advantages to almost everyone concerned that this led to what would prove to be a fatal misunderstanding over the very nature of the marriage. For her it was all quite simple. At nineteen, she was still as romantic as ever and eagerly in search of love. She had had a teenage crush on the Prince even before her sister Sarah started going out with him, and when he proposed to her she genuinely believed he was in love with her. As far as she was concerned, she was embarking on a lifelong royal love match.
But for the others involved, and especially Prince Charles, the marriage was nothing of the sort. For them it was essentially an old-style royal marriage of convenience, the ‘convenience’ being that the union was intended to suit all concerned, the Spencers, the Royal Family, the Prince and Camilla, and the international media, especially the TV networks with however many millions of eager viewers round the world. But Diana’s feelings were totally ignored.
Had she been older, more experienced, and of a colder and more calculating nature, this sort of royal marriage might still have suited her as well. Once married, she would be envied, feted, and endlessly deferred to, with the prospect of becoming Queen of England and mother of the royal children. She would also bring much needed fresh prestige and honour to the Spencers by linking them directly with the Royal Family.
All that was lacking was the one thing that not unnaturally concerned her. What she wanted from the Prince was his undivided love, but he was very much in love with someone else.
Later, Diana would claim that almost from the start she had her doubts about the Prince’s feelings and that even as he proposed: ‘a voice within me said, “You won’t be Queen.’”
Whether this was true or not, it didn’t stop her accepting his proposal and enjoying the intense media attention, along with her flat-mates’ envy, her father’s happiness and the quiet pleasure of upstaging her stepmother, Raine Spencer.
Someone should have made the nature of the marriage clear to her from the beginning. But who? And how? Prince Charles could not very well explain the situation, and no one else could risk derailing the marriage of the decade. The one person who did apparently utter a few heavily veiled words of warning was her grandmother, Lady Fermoy, who told her: ‘Darling, you must understand that their sense of humour and their life-style are different, and I don’t think it will suit you.’
At this point, the position of Ruth Fermoy is all important, and the fact that she felt it necessary to say this to Diana shows something of the genuine dilemma she was facing. In theory, nothing should have pleased her more than the prospect of her own granddaughter one day becoming Queen of England. Indeed, for someone so involved with royalty as Ruth Fermoy, it would have seemed the culmination of her wildest ambitions. Once Diana had given birth to a royal heir, Lady Fermoy would stand beside her friend and patron, the Queen Mother, as joint great-grandmother of the future monarch, and the Fermoys too would have gained their place within the bloodline of the monarchy.
But it was not that simple. As Diana’s grandmother, she was the one influential courtier who really knew the Spencers, and what had been going on at Althorp. She also knew about the complexities of Diana’s character, and that there was considerably more to her than the shy and loving young girl she appeared. Like everyone at court, she also knew about Prince Charles and Camilla, and was intelligent enough to realise that Diana was never going to accept a rival.
To speak, or not to speak - that was Ruth Fermoy’s dilemma. When it came to it, she decided to say nothing, apart from the fairly harmless warning that she gave Diana. She knew her well enough to understand that it would not make her change her mind, but if anything did go wrong it meant that she could salve her conscience. Having warned her, she was covered.
There was one further reason which, although unspoken, must have lain behind Ruth Fermoy’s obvious uneasiness about Diana entering the Royal House of Windsor. It was this. Better than anyone, she knew that Jack Spencer had been right and that there was a streak of nervous instability among the Fermoys. Her husband’s unmarried twin brother, Frank Roche, had been a serious depressive. So was her own son and Diana’s favourite uncle, Edmund, fifth Baron Fermoy, who was already showing symptoms of the depressive illness that would lead to his suicide three years later. As a devoted monarchist, Lady Fermoy must have had serious doubts about the wisdom of introducing this particular genetic streak of the Fermoys into the British Royal Family.
What makes the situation even stranger is that while Ruth Fermoy was facing her dilemma, Diana’s own doubts about her marriage were growing. She was by now more or less convinced that Prince Charles was still in love with Camilla Parker Bowles. Just two days before the wedding, over lunch, a desperate Diana told her sisters that she could not go through with it. ‘Well, bad luck, Duch,’ one of them replied, ‘your face is on the tea towels so you’re too late to chicken out’. As of course she was. She was irrevocably cast in the starring role in one of the most impressive and at this point the most widely seen royal ceremonies in history.
Some eighty years before, after the death of Queen Victoria, when the Royal Family began to lose their old symbolic power over the largest empire in history, they had reinforced their popularity, like the Roman emperors before them, by entering the entertainment industry. In 1901, Lord Esher, the Cecil B. de Mille of royalty, was asked to devise much of the grandiose royal pageantry surrounding the Coronation of King Edward VII. Victoria’s coronation had been considerably simpler and shorter, but henceforth the pageantry of the great ceremonies of state involving the monarch and his family became the bedrock upon which the soon to be renamed Royal House of Windsor would consolidate their popularity.
Again, as with the Romans, one legacy the British Empire had left its leaders was an unrivalled talent for the pageantry of state, and the Windsors and their courtiers would raise these great royal ceremonies to something of an art form. During the 1930s, when the totalitarian regimes of Europe were staging their robot-like massed rallies at Nuremburg and Moscow, our public ceremonies were already being choreographed around the lives and rites of passage of members of this apparently benevolent, infinitely famous Royal Family, in their coronations, marriages, jubilees and funerals.
It was a formula that served them well. The televised Coronation of the young Queen Elizabeth II in June 1953 brought a boost of patriotic fervour to a jaded nation, with hopes for a royal revival in a second great ‘Elizabethan’ age. It was not to last. By the end of the irreverent sixties the younger generation of Elizabeth’s subjects was becoming bored with the New Elizabethans. Resourceful as ever, the Windsors ventured warily upon the thin ice of co-operation with the media by revealing what was called ‘the human face of monarchy’ in a TV film entitled ‘Royal Family’. This offered their fascinated subjects the novel revelation that this Royal Family who enjoyed barbecues, had nick-names for each other and laughed at one another’s jokes were quite ordinary people after all.
This, of course, was total nonsense. For while these members of the House of Windsor may have looked and sounded ordinary, in fact they were living the most privileged lives of anybody in the land. But the royal soap opera had begun. Through the media, people began to feel they knew the
m personally. They could love or hate them like familiar relations. Sometimes they identified with them and finally, of course, they judged them.
But this ceaseless press and public interest in the Royal Family brought problems, particularly when the taste for royal scandal became insatiable, as it did at the time of Princess Margaret’s unprecedented divorce from Lord Snowdon in 1978. But while scandal upset the Royal Family, it undoubtedly fuelled public interest in the monarchy, which was steadily increasing.
Then, towards the late 1970s, a new affliction hit the House of Windsor - age. With the Queen and Prince Philip entering late middle age, the Royal Family lacked youth and glamour. Younger members of the family were needed, which in turn meant more royal marriages. As public ceremonies, the weddings of Princess Margaret and Princess Anne had been enormously successful for this new performing monarchy (despite the fact that neither marriage lasted). It is easy to see exactly why the court was attaching such importance to this marriage of the future King of England. This wedding of the royal heir had two further advantages over all previous nuptials in the royal house of Windsor. The first was live satellite colour television. The second was Diana.
She was Cinderella. She was a fairytale princess who might almost have been the girl next door, and the gentle, still girlish image had immediate appeal for every woman who as a child had ever dreamed of marrying a prince.
On that summer morning in 1981, viewing the procession on live television as it passed through the crowded streets of London was like watching some splendid royal occasion from the pages of the history books. Such was the impact of the ceremony, and so great the international involvement of this massive audience, that Diana instantly became the most famous bride the world had ever seen. By the end of that extraordinary day neither she, nor the Royal Family, would ever be the same again.
In his address, Archbishop Runcie informed the watching millions: ‘Here is the stuff of which fairytales are made.’ It was also the stuff of which an international royal superstar had been created. And as the more sentimental viewers dried their tears, the world was taking it for granted that this fairy story must have a happy ending, as it would have done if Prince Charles had loved her.
On the newlyweds’ return from their honeymoon, it cannot have taken the House of Windsor long to realise they had a serious problem on their hands. Their bland assumption that they knew Diana Spencer simply was not true. A Spencer she may have been, but she was not a gently nurtured aristocrat, with the courtly manners and the loyal discretion of her courtier aunts and grandmothers.
Despite the extraordinary success of the wedding, there was something seriously wrong between the couple from the start, with the Prince uneasy and his bride obviously unhappy, nervous, desperately thin while suffering from bulimia, and often bursting into tears.
Any family would find this hard to cope with, but it must have been particularly hard for the Windsors. Neither by training nor tradition are royalty accustomed or equipped to deal with anyone behaving badly. This makes it understandable that from the start Diana received so little sympathy or support from this strange family to which she now found herself irretrievably committed. As far as they were concerned, she was clearly being tiresome, and should have known better what was expected of her. They only hoped that, given time, she would settle down and come to her senses.
Meanwhile, the inevitable reaction in the Palace was, ‘Oh, poor Charles!’
Total immersion in the Royal Family must have been a formidable ordeal for someone as inexperienced as Diana. Only recently, when thirty-two-year old Sophie Rhys Jones became engaged to the Queen’s youngest son, Prince Edward, she was asked by a reporter whether she thought that she could cope with being a member of the Royal Family. She said she thought she could just about do so now, but she would certainly have been unable to five years earlier. In contrast, back in 1981, Diana was barely twenty, ignorant of the world and the reality of the court, and had virtually nobody to turn to when things went wrong.
In an ordinary family the unhappiness of a young, jealous bride would have been their own affair. But this was not an ordinary family. It was the British Royal Family, and the bride would one day be the Queen of England. She was already admired and loved by millions. Surely somebody at court must have seen the danger of making such a young girl so potentially powerful while leaving her so unhappy.
With the birth of Prince William in 1982, Diana had consolidated her position in the Royal Family. She had performed her most important duty to the House of Windsor, and whatever doubts its individual members may have had about her, as mother of the future king, she was now of central importance to the monarchy.
The infant prince formed the one real link between his parents and was a source of unaccustomed joy between them. Prince Charles told his friends, Hugh and Emilie van Cutsem that he was ‘utterly elated’. ‘I can’t tell you how excited and proud I am,’ he added. Diana felt the same, and from the start adored her son. But the birth of Prince William had left her in the grip of postnatal depression, and the misery continued.
By now it was probably too late for things to change. The worse Diana felt and the more difficult she became, the more sympathy Prince Charles apparently received from his family and friends. They now felt she was causing him unnecessary anxiety and, as royalty can never be at fault, the blame would always rest with her.
It was a time when everyone involved required sound advice on how to handle the situation. There was one obvious courtier who should have helped - Diana’s grandmother, Ruth Fermoy.
One of the most important moments of the royal day was the Queen’s morning telephone call to her mother. The Queen had long relied upon her mother’s wisdom and advice, and among other things they discussed family matters, which of course included Charles and Diana’s problems. This meant that as the Queen Mother’s close friend and confidante, Ruth Fermoy knew exactly what was happening and was the one person at court who could have genuinely helped her granddaughter.
It seems as if she did the opposite. Like all true courtiers, her loyalties lay exclusively with the Royal Family. Ever since the much publicised Spencer divorce, she had always disapproved of her daughter Frances. As she had once renounced her daughter, it seems she now did much the same with Diana. Since she invariably agreed with the Royal Family, now she inevitably sided with the Prince.
But knowing what she did about the mental stability of the Fermoys, she must have been in an intolerable position. Shortly before she died in 1993, she said she blamed herself for not having warned Prince Charles about Diana before the marriage. By now it was far too late.
A member of Lady Fermoy’s own family once called her ‘very beautiful and very cold’, and one gets an idea of her attitude to life from the diaries of the biographer Hugo Vickers, whom met her at dinner in 1982. ‘There was talk of the death sentence,’ he wrote afterwards. ‘Lady Fermoy was all for the cat and caning. She said, “The fear of being hurt is the great prevention.” She was also, naturally, pro-hanging.’ She was hardly the one to make allowances for an unhappy granddaughter.
Diana’s postnatal depression lifted around the time she and Charles went on tour to Australia and New Zealand, taking their baby with them in spring 1983. This was the first time since their wedding that they both saw how enormously popular the Princess had become with ordinary people. In Sydney, a million turned out to greet them. Prince Charles had never experienced a crowd like it, but it was painfully clear to him that once again it was Diana that they wished to see. This continued throughout the six week tour. The photographs show them sitting determinedly apart and the Prince is rarely smiling. Diana said that she returned ‘more grown up and mature’, but that her husband had become increasingly put out by her popularity.
Everyone agrees that there seemed to be a brief period of happiness between them just before the birth of their second son, Prince Harry, in September 1984. But when the Prince was born, Charles’s attitude had changed from the e
xcitement he had shown at the birth of Prince William. Initially he was disappointed to have a second son, having longed for a daughter, and Diana was convinced by now that Prince Charles had returned to ‘his lady’. So instead of this birth bringing the two of them together, the marriage now began to fall apart, and the biggest crisis to afflict the House of Windsor since the Abdication, started forming in the wreckage.
Chapter 17
Death of a Princess
It was not long before the Spencers themselves became disappointed by their lack of contact with the court and with their royal in-laws. The high hopes of Diana’s marriage rescuing the family from decline and adding to its lustre and prestige were fading fast.
Not for the first time the Countess’s commercial instincts had been causing trouble - in Japan she had been promoting sales of copies of Diana’s wedding dress and licensing the name ‘Royal Spencer’ to golf clubs. Unsurprisingly this had been disapproved of by the court.
At the same time, difficulties in the Wales’s marriage had not helped relations between Johnnie and his royal son-in-law. Prince Charles had annoyed him early in his marriage by his tactless remarks on the restorations of the newly decorated rooms at Althorp. In return Johnnie started referring to him as ‘my Gordonstoun son-in-law’ and saying that one of the reasons he had done so badly on the polo field was ‘because he is too mean to buy himself a decent pony’.
But the real cause of trouble was, of course, Diana. Although she made a point of not discussing her problems with her father he was very much aware of what was happening. Around this time he revealed something of his real feelings on the subject when interviewed by the Nova Scotia Chronicle during a trip to Canada. He was more forthright than he would have been in England.
‘Prince William will grow up close to the Spencer side of the family,’ he said, ‘and he will be influenced by them as much as by the royals. I know the royals can appear to swallow people up when others marry in, and the other family always looks as if it had been pushed out, but that could never happen with us. We can cope with the pressures. We have been brought up with royalty and there is no question of being pushed out. Diana would not permit it to happen, and she always gets her way.’