Diana: In Pursuit of Love (39 page)

For the last few years of her life, she had, without truly acknowledging it, achieved her ambition. She had reached out, over the heads of the Palace and the mass media, and made a genuine connection with the people. In their turn, they had witnessed and watched her journey of self-discovery, seeing in her victories and defeats, her strengths and frailties, her loves and losses, something of their own lives.

While the collective reaction to her death has been characterized as a retreat from reason into mawkish sentimentality, the underlying
mood of dislocation and unease reflected a wider disenchantment with the great institutions of State, not only the monarchy, but the mass media and political Establishment. Since Diana’s death this scepticism has become firmly entrenched in the national consciousness, reflected not just in the cynicism surrounding her accident – illustrated by the variety of conspiracy theories that abound – but also with regard to day-to-day political discourse, notably opposition in 2003 to the Iraq war. On the day of the funeral this sense of alienation found articulate and biting expression in Earl Spencer’s speech.

He threw down the gauntlet to the Sovereign and her family, revealing the hurt felt by Spencer towards Windsor as he implicitly rebuked the Queen for stripping Diana of her title ‘Her Royal Highness’, as well as, for good measure, chiding the royal family for the way they had brought up their children: ‘On behalf of your mother and sisters, I pledge that we, your blood family, will do all we can to continue the imaginative and loving 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.’

Having cloaked the young princes in the Spencer standard, he proceeded to tear a strip off the mass media who had made his sister’s life such a daily torment: ‘My own and only explanation is that genuine goodness is threatening to 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.’

As he finished his peroration, praising his sister as the ‘unique, the complex, the extraordinary and irreplaceable Diana, whose beauty, both internal and external, will never be extinguished from our minds’, applause rippled from outside the open doors of the Abbey as the crowds watching on the giant screens gestured their support. Inside the Abbey the congregation took their own cue, in turn applauding an electrifying address that somehow typified the Spencer clan – reckless, brave, intemperate, yet capturing the popular mood.

There were many, however, particularly supporters of the royal family, who thought the Earl’s words ill-judged and inappropriate. As with much of Diana’s behaviour, the speech took the royal family and their households completely by surprise. ‘The mood inside the royal family was very angry about what he said and the courtiers were apoplectic, shell-shocked,’ recollected Dickie Arbiter. ‘But then if you look into the history of the Spencer family they have tended to go off half-cocked and on the wrong occasions.’

The rout was complete, however, when the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Robert Fellowes, suggested to the Earl that the Sovereign might be willing to reinstate Diana’s title. Their informal conversation, on the royal train heading to Althorp where Diana was to be buried, had only one result – her brother turned it down flat. He had no real choice, especially just having told a worldwide audience that Diana ‘needed no royal title to continue to generate her particular brand of magic’. As one member of the family said, ‘It was a gesture far too late, which perhaps should have been made during her life.’

On her last journey to the island on the Althorp estate, chosen by her mother and brother for her grave, Diana had come full circle. In a final and fittingly symbolic gesture, the royal standard that had covered her coffin during her journey from Kensington Palace to Westminster Abbey, and thence to Althorp, was replaced by the white, red, black and gold of the Spencer flag. It was a decision that had been mutually agreed and prearranged.

During the private thirty-minute ceremony attended only by her immediate family, Colin Tebbutt and Paul Burrell, there was a palpable feeling that she had returned home. As her mother later noted, ‘Diana had become a Spencer, independent and herself again.’

C
HAPTER
T
WELVE

Trials of the Torch Bearers

H
ISTORY HAS NOT BEEN KIND
to Princesses of Wales. Ignored, betrayed, evicted and abused, they have suffered harshly for marrying the heir to the throne. It is a title written in tears. During the fifteenth century, the Spanish princess, Catherine of Aragon was engaged to be married to Arthur Tudor, heir to the mighty dynasty, when she was just two and he only one. Married and publicly bedded at fifteen, they could not even speak each other’s language and had to converse through bishops who translated for them. When he died a year later, Catherine, lonely and unhappy in a strange country, was passed on, like so much luggage, to his younger brother, Henry, becoming the first of his six wives.

While there are parallels between Catherine and Diana, Princess of Wales, in that both were chosen as potential brides because of their dynastic pedigree, the figure Diana most closely resembles is Princess Caroline of Brunswick, the sorrowful but spirited wife of the Prince of Wales who, in 1820, became King George IV. Like Diana, she married a Prince who had a long-term lover, an issue which became a source of hot dispute and unhappiness. Like Diana, Princess Caroline was cast out of court and, being forced to make her own way in life, was determined to go down fighting. Seen as a victim of a cold, devious and calculating Establishment, she was a hugely popular figure, loved by the common people for her pluck.

‘She symbolized, as Diana did, the revolt of the outsiders, the excluded, against the insiders, the ruling powers,’ the historian Dr David Starkey wrote. When the wronged Queen was barred from attending King George IV’s coronation in 1821 many supported her when she rode to the ceremony uninvited. Sternly the king had ordered every door to be guarded by prizefighters and she left the scene, humiliated. Three weeks later she died, the new king ordering her body to be returned to Germany lest her grave become a rallying point for opposition to his rule. Yet, as her coffin was taken to the coast, thousands flocked to the ‘ramshackle cavalcade’ in a gesture of popular support for the first ‘people’s princess’. Within months the Carolinian movement, an audacious attempt to capture her spirit, was over and the Princess, now buried in a foreign land, consigned to the position of an entertaining footnote in history.

After the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, her former husband, like his forebear George IV, attempted to define himself apart from his wife and mistress, to be valued for his public achievements rather than his messy private life. As a strategy it was entirely understandable if ultimately unrealistic, the Prince’s followers seeking to diminish Diana’s memory by their indifference, quietly sniping from the sidelines. It was, however, the vacuum created by the withdrawal of the Prince and the royal family from any involvement in defining her legacy and memory that would ultimately diminish the institution. Diana’s influence on the royal family was to be far more potent from beyond the grave than when she lived.

In the void left by the Windsors’ apparent lack of concern, it was, paradoxically, among her erstwhile supporters and allies that the cruellest infighting took place as they attempted to define, burnish and control her memory. In the process, the self-appointed keepers of her flame were severely burnt. As the commentator Michael Ignatieff observed, ‘At the centre of it all, three great families – the Spencers, the Windsors and the Fayeds – duelled in public over the ownership of her symbolic remains.’ One name missing from his roll call was that of Diana’s butler, Paul Burrell, who went from walk-on part to centre stage, the
battle for her legacy ending in a raucous trial in No. 1 Court at the Old Bailey, as well as a formal police investigation into her last hours led by Britain’s most senior police officer.

Within a few months of her death it was as though Diana had never existed. Her apartment at Kensington Palace had been completely stripped bare; the furniture was taken to St James’s Palace for the boys or the Royal Collection, her clothes burnt or taken to Althorp, and her papers sent to the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle or to her family home. Everything, from the carpets, the silk wallpaper, the plants and even the light bulbs, was removed, leaving Apartments 8 and 9 empty and anonymous. It took six months to make a comprehensive inventory of the Princess’s belongings. Every single item from nightshirts to robes to writing pads was logged and noted. Just before the first anniversary of her death the sign outside her former home was painted over. The only reminder of her luminous presence was a portrait by John Ward exhibited in the public rooms at Kensington Palace.

It was a process that began within hours of her death. The bloodied and torn clothes she wore that fateful night were kept in the fridge at Kensington Palace and then secretly burnt in a brazier in the back garden of Paul Burrell’s Cheshire home. Diana’s gymwear, knickers, swimming costumes, tights and stockings were also incinerated to stop them getting into the hands of misguided collectors. The Spencers were terrified of trophy hunters. In the first days Prince Charles suggested that her apartment be sealed, but the Princess’s comptroller, Michael Gibbins, opposed the notion. He decided that it would be neither feasible nor appropriate – and he was concerned about what would happen if the suicidal Burrell was denied access to ‘his’ domain.

In the coming weeks it was left to Diana’s mother and her sister Sarah McCorquodale, as well as her butler, to sift through the detritus of a life cut short. As her family sat in the now quiet apartment, her spirit seemed still to be present: in the smell of her perfume and scented candles, the wardrobe filled with her clothes, and the notes and cards on her desk that spoke of a life in full flood. They were also presented with four sacks of letters
assembled by the butler, which they divided into bread-and-butter thank-you notes, letters for her boys and correspondence to friends, family and others. As they began the sad task of sorting through her belongings, they were helped by Meredith Etherington-Smith, who had catalogued Diana’s dresses for the charity auction in New York. She now made a final inventory of the Princess’s four giant wardrobes – Diana habitually gave away many of her clothes, to her sisters, friends and staff, including Maria Burrell – while David Thomas, the Crown jeweller, compiled details of her jewellery. Burrell himself went through the twenty rooms labelling, describing and noting their contents. Every night the rooms they were working in would be sealed with masking tape.

As the family sifted through her life, they could see at first hand the impact Diana’s death had had on her butler. Before the funeral, Mrs Shand Kydd was so concerned about Paul Burrell’s mental state that she handed the grieving butler a necklace with a gold cross to give him spiritual sustenance. Afterwards, when they went through the Princess’s belongings, the three of them, as well as other visitors like Diana’s hairdresser Sam McKnight, were able to reminisce about Diana’s foibles and fads, vices and virtues with the ease of those who knew the character concerned intimately. With Burrell they didn’t have to pretend. He was considered part of the family. Often when they had finished their work for the day, Mrs Shand Kydd would join Paul and his wife Maria in their grace-and-favour apartment in Kensington Palace, a home that was something of a shrine, every surface covered in framed photographs and other memorabilia of their life with the royal family. Taking pride of place on the wall was a bullwhip given to Diana when she attended the première of an Indiana Jones movie. Knowing his love of films – he is a collector of cells from Disney movies – she had passed it on to her butler with the joking proviso, ‘As long as you don’t use it on Maria.’

Relations between the Spencers and Burrells could have been very different. In those first months, the Spencers found Burrell’s intimate knowledge of her affairs invaluable. On one occasion when Lady Sarah asked about the significance of a rosary amongst
Diana’s belongings, Burrell told her, to her evident surprise, that it was a gift from the Pope. And it was he who retrieved the key, from the bottom of a tennis racket case, which opened the now notorious mahogany box containing Diana’s ‘crown jewels’ – notably a signet ring from James Hewitt; letters from Prince Philip to the Princess following the publication of
Diana: Her True Story
in 1992; the resignation letter from her private secretary Patrick Jephson; and a tape recording of her conversation with Prince Charles’s orderly George Smith in which Smith alleged that he had been raped by a member of the Prince’s staff.