My Husband and I

by Ingrid Seward

  Prince Philip had virtually lost his own mother at the age of ten when she was committed to an asylum in Switzerland. He also lost his favourite sister and her family in an air crash in 1937 when he was sixteen. So to some extent he understood what William and Harry were suffering. They both loved their grandpa, who would take them shooting, duck-flighting and watch them speed round the go-kart track at Balmoral. They took no notice of his gruffness and acerbic comments. They just liked being around him, and during that strange, surreal week they were glad of his reassuring presence.

  The turreted battlements of Balmoral castle are remarkably resistant to the onslaught of unpleasant reality, however. Queen Victoria hid behind them following the death of Prince Albert, detached from the world beyond, secure in a realm of her own creation which remains very much as she left it, down to the furnishings and the wallpaper. Now her descendants were doing much the same thing following the death of the princess. After the uproar of the first night, Balmoral had settled back into its old routine, and if the atmosphere was muted, everyone still dressed for dinner.

  If that was due in part to the royal family’s firmly held conviction that in times of trouble, sticking to the rules of protocol offers the best form of defence, it also reflected the antipathy some of them felt towards Diana, because of all the controversies created by her relationship with Prince Charles.

  While her sister, her mother and her husband had long given up on Diana, the Queen retained some of her affection for her daughter-in-law. Alone in her family, she found it in herself to sympathise with her problems. Changing the long-established traditions for a woman who, by the letter of the law, was no longer royal was quite another matter, however. She had objected to Tony Blair being represented on the funeral committee, which had been set up under the chairmanship of her Lord Chamberlain, the Earl of Airlie, and it had required another argument to induce her to give way. And it was only when Prince Charles insisted that his ex-wife, as the mother of two princes of the blood, was entitled to (but didn’t have) a state funeral that she had given up on her idea for a small, private ceremony.

  What she said she was not prepared to do, however, at least not at this stage, was defer to the demands of the mob and go scurrying back to London. Such an action ran counter to the dignity she had been brought up to hold dear. But events were rapidly sliding out of royal control, and even the Queen’s resolve was eventually broken. On the Thursday, a Union Jack was hoisted over Buckingham Palace and flew there at half-mast for the first time in British history. That same day, the family came out of their self-imposed seclusion to look at the flowers and letters of condolence which had been lain against the stone walls of the Balmoral estate.

  Of greatest significance was the Queen’s decision to return to London a day ahead of schedule. It was tantamount to a surrender. The final battle between tradition and modern political necessity was fought out in the Queen’s tartan-carpeted first-floor sitting room. Ever since the crisis erupted, the Queen’s advisers, including Janvrin and her lady-in-waiting, Lady Susan Hussey, had been monitoring what was happening in London. They had gone by the book, but that had not worked and by midweek it had become clear to everyone but the sovereign that the royal family was going to have to give way if it wasn’t going to suffer perhaps irretrievable damage to its reputation. That led to yet more strained discussions.

  Matters were brought to a head by the appearance of the bumptious Prince Andrew, who was staying at the castle. Politically naïve but a pedantic stickler for protocol, he walked into the sitting room, heard the arguments flowing backwards and forwards and furiously declared: ‘The Queen is the Queen. You can’t speak to her like that!’ The Queen’s word, he said, was their command and it was their duty to carry out any instruction she chose to give. A week before, that might have been true. It clearly wasn’t in these circumstances and the sitting room was struck into stony silence. It was broken by the courtier who said that if the Queen did not want their advice, they would leave.

  Faced with what amounted to an ultimatum from her own staff, the Queen chose to ignore her favourite son and accept the counsel of her advisers. She had no choice. The discussion was no longer about what was appropriate for Diana. It had come down to the future of the monarchy itself. In the judgement of the men and women whose job it is to guide the monarchy through the storms of controversy, the situation was critical and their advice was blunt and to the point: like it or not, the crowds had to be appeased if a major constitutional crisis was to be averted. This was no longer a simple family matter where the Queen and Prince Philip’s opinion was decisive.

  The Queen at last agreed. The original plan had been for her to travel south overnight by train and go straight from the station to Westminster Abbey. That was abandoned and instead she flew to London on the Friday, accompanied by Prince Philip, Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother, who, royal trouper that she was, had categorically rejected her daughter’s pleas to spare her health and stay behind in Scotland.

  Back in the capital, the Queen drove straight to Buckingham Palace and, with Prince Philip at her side, left the safety of her own forecourt and went out to mingle with the heaving throng gathered beyond the flower-covered railings. It proved to be a disconcerting experience for the 71-year-old sovereign. A chasm had opened between the governed and their governors, and instead of the respect and polite applause which had been her due all her life, she was surrounded by people whose animosity was blatant. ‘About bloody time, too,’ someone said. ‘That gave the Queen quite a turn,’ one of her staff remarked later.

  With the composure that comes with a lifetime’s training, the Queen managed her walkabout with grace and dignity, stopping to chat, asking the right questions, giving the appropriate answers. It was a sterling performance, and to look at her – and the people who came within touching distance looked at her very closely indeed – it was hard to see any chink in her self-possession. It was quite clear to those who knew her, however, that she had been very alarmed by the reception she had received. She could not comprehend why people had been so hostile.

  ‘What do they want me to do?’ she asked. No one could remember ever seeing the Queen so agitated, so unsure of herself.

  She was more her usual self by the time she went on television that evening to deliver her valedictory to her dead daughter-in-law. Sitting against an open window of the palace, with the crowds on the street providing the backdrop, she spoke simply and movingly in a voice an octave lower than the cut-glass tinkle of her youth and in an accent which had been stripped of some of its upper-class resonance. It was a speech loaded with subtly coded messages.

  It offered an explanation for what to many had seemed the royal family’s indifference to the death of a young woman who was being elevated to secular sainthood. ‘We have all been trying in our different ways to cope,’ the Queen said, adding, by way of apology: ‘It is not easy to express a sense of loss, since the initial shock is often succeeded by a mixture of other feelings: disbelief, incomprehension, anger and concern for all who remain. We have all felt those emotions in these last few days. So what I have to say to you now, as your Queen and as a grandmother, I say from my heart.’

  She acknowledged, as she had to, the qualities which had touched the hearts of so many of the people who could be seen in the background. ‘First, I want to pay tribute to Diana myself. She was an exceptional and gifted human being. In good times and bad, she never lost her capacity to smile and laugh, nor to inspire others with her warmth and kindness. I admired and respected her – for her energy and commitment to others and especially for her devotion to her boys.’

  She explained the royal family’s decision to stay in Scotland. ‘This week at Balmoral we have all been trying to help William and Harry come to terms with the devastating loss that they and the rest of us have suffered.’

  And she promised a new beginning. ‘I for one,’ the Queen said, ‘believe that there are lessons to be drawn from her life and from the
extraordinary and moving reaction to her death.’

  The address was designed to pacify and appease a country which, in the space of a few short days, had become thoroughly disenchanted with its ruling family. It was written by Sir Robert Fellowes and checked by Blair’s press spokesman Alastair Campbell, who had added in the sentimental but apposite ‘grandmother’ reference. It was not quite the wholehearted apologia many took it to be, however.

  The Queen had been drawn to breaking point and it had left her flustered, perplexed – and angry. Her authority had been challenged, her good intentions called into question, the character of her family cast into the gravest doubt. The Queen was spared most of the vitriol; even in this moment of crisis, the British people’s peculiar, almost mystical attachment to their monarch still held fast. It was the other members of the royal clan – the amorphous ‘them’ – who were being blamed for what had happened. But that was hardly any reassurance. The atmosphere in the Mall was charged with hostility and the Queen had just seen and heard at first hand how incensed so many of her subjects were and how thoroughly disillusioned they had become with the family she heads. It was without doubt the worst juncture of her reign. But if the situation was grave, she was still the Queen – ‘your Queen’ as she reminded the millions who watched her speech – and this elderly lady who had sat on the throne for almost half a century was not going to bow too deeply to the hordes at the palace gates.

  As she walked off the makeshift set she asked, ‘Was that contrite enough?’ It was not a question. It was a joke, but one delivered without a trace of humour and there was steely resolve in her voice.

  It wasn’t just the millions of mourners who had to be placated, however. There was also the more intimate problem of the Spencers to deal with. Lady Jane and Lady Sarah were willing to fall in with whatever plans formulated by the royal family and Jane’s husband, Sir Robert Fellowes. Their brother was not. Charles Spencer, who had succeeded their father as the ninth Earl in 1991, had what might best be called an ambivalent relationship with his famous sister and the two had seen little of each other in recent years. As the head of the Spencer family, however, he claimed the right to have a say – and a decisive one at that – in the funeral arrangements.

  Even without his intervention, there were plenty of complications. The royal family is swaddled in ceremonial rituals supposedly drawn from the mists of an ancient past. Most, in fact, are of much more recent fabrication and few pre-date the Victorian era when pageantry became an imperial art form. But this ability to invent a rite to fit the occasion had withered along with the Empire which spawned it. Precedent had superseded improvisation, and by now the House of Windsor and the bureaucrats who serve it had become trapped in the entanglements of their own rules. Without an example to turn to, they had no clear idea of how to honour a princess they had expelled from their fold.

  The only model they had available was the one that had been devised for the Queen Mother, and it was in desperation that the funeral committee was reduced to plundering the plans she had so carefully laid for what would be her own last great state occasion. As the last person alive with any experience of organising such an event, following the death of King George VI, she had spent several years checking every detail, down to where the soldiers would be positioned. Without an alternative, this became the template for Diana’s funeral. Britain’s last Queen-Empress was understandably piqued at having her own meticulous preparations purloined for a woman who had never been a queen. Along with the rest of her family, she was also nonplussed by Lord Spencer’s interference in what, like it or not, was now clearly a royal event.

  Over the Queen’s objections, Lord Spencer insisted that Diana be buried, not at Frogmore, but at the family home of Althorp in Northamptonshire. He also said he should be the only one to walk behind the princess’s cortege. Given that they had effectively excluded her, the royal family were in no position to deny Spencer his wishes as to her final resting place. The cortege was quite another matter. In a mark of respect to an ex-wife and a departed mother, Prince Charles wanted to walk behind the cortege with William and Harry beside him. Another of the by-now interminable rows ensued over the telephone, which Spencer ended by hanging up on the prince. This was one point on which the royal family were not prepared to give way, however. It was made clear to Spencer that, regardless of whatever private feelings he might harbour, the prince and his sons would walk behind the gun carriage bearing the princess’s coffin.

  The next difficulty was persuading William to join his father, uncle and brother in the slow walk from St James’s Palace to Westminster Abbey. At first William flatly refused. Charles pleaded with him and said that it would be utterly wrong of him not to accompany them. The prince, never comfortable in the eye of a crowd – and certainly not one so charged with emotion and looking at his every gesture – replied that he simply didn’t want to. Prince Philip weighed into the argument and eventually William agreed to take part – but only on the condition that his grandfather walked beside him.

  Diana had grown to dislike Prince Philip intensely – and he her – but Prince William was devoted to the old man. Philip, in turn, was immensely fond of his grandson. He had taught him to shoot, and William liked nothing better than spending his days with his grandfather out in the fields of Sandringham or wildfowling on the foreshore of the Wash. As football or cricket is in other families, field sports provided the common interest that crossed the generations and bound them together. Now William wanted his grandfather at his side in what was certain to prove the most harrowing public engagement the young man had had to endure. Philip readily agreed and as the cortege trundled under Admiralty Arch it was Philip who put a comforting arm around William’s shoulder.

  ‘Walking behind her coffin was one of the hardest things I have ever done,’ Prince William admitted in May 2017. ‘But if I had been in floods of tears the entire way round, how would that have looked? It was self-preservation. I didn’t feel comfortable anyway, having that massive outpouring of emotion around me. I am a very private person, so it wasn’t easy.’

  If getting there had been fraught, there was still more upheaval awaiting them in Westminster Abbey. Built by Edward the Confessor in 1065, it is the spiritual font of the British monarchy. Kings and queens had been crowned and buried there for almost a thousand years. It can therefore only be construed as an act of calculated revenge for the unhappiness he believed they had caused his sister, that Lord Spencer chose it as the setting in which to deliver a swingeing attack on the family of the sovereign to whom, as a peer, he had sworn ‘to bear true allegiance’.

  The press came in for a fierce lashing in his address. ‘She talked endlessly about getting away from England, mainly because of the treatment that she had received at the hands of the newspapers,’ he said. ‘I don’t think she ever understood why her genuinely good intentions were sneered at by the media, why there appeared to be a permanent quest on their behalf to bring her down. It is baffling. My own and only explanation is that genuine goodness is threatening those at the opposite end of the moral spectrum. It is a point to remember that of all the ironies about Diana, perhaps the greatest was this – a girl given the name of the ancient goddess of hunting was, in the end, the most hunted person of the modern age.’

  Spencer himself had once been a part of the media he so savagely lambasted. Indeed, he had once been employed by the giant NBC television network in America specifically because he was Diana’s brother. The problems in his own marriage had quickly brought him into conflict with the press, however, and given his anguish and the paroxysm of recriminations it had induced, his remarks were perhaps understandable.

  What was far more striking and totally unexpected was his condemnation of the royal family. When he said, ‘She needed no royal title to continue to generate her brand of magic,’ he was referring to the Queen’s questionable decision to strip her daughter-in-law of the designation Her Royal Highness, which reduced Diana once again to the rank of
commoner.

  His closing remarks were even more barbed. ‘She would want us today to pledge ourselves to protecting her beloved boys, William and Harry, from a similar fate, and I do this here, Diana, on your behalf. We will not allow them to suffer the anguish that used regularly to drive you to tearful despair. And beyond that, on behalf of your mother and sisters I pledge that we, your blood family, will do all we can to continue the imaginative way in which you were steering these two exceptional young men so that their souls are not simply immersed by duty and tradition but can sing openly as you planned.’

  What Spencer was saying in no uncertain terms was that he considered the royal family unfit to bring up his nephews. It was a stinging rebuke of their father and the values of duty and tradition, which are the bedrock of royal life. The Anglican funeral service allows no place for allegation, accusation or the settling of scores. Quite the opposite: it is a ceremony of remembrance which is designed to bury the woes of this life alongside the body of the deceased. By going against time-honoured form, Spencer was guilty of gross bad manners. Hypocrisy, too, got an airing, because it wasn’t Victoria, his wife and the mother of his four children, whom the earl had brought to the abbey that day, but his latest mistress, Josie Borain. Spencer was not the person best qualified to deliver a lecture on good parenting to the Prince of Wales from the pulpit of an abbey in front of a worldwide television audience of several hundred million.

  Curiously, the prince’s initial reaction was not one of outrage but of relief. Spencer had refused to allow him to see a draft of his address and after the telephone altercations he had had with his erstwhile brother-in-law in the hours leading up to the funeral, he had been expecting a lot worse than the admonition which was finally delivered. The Queen and Prince Philip, on the other hand, were appalled and their indignation was writ large in their stony glares.