The Prince of Wales’s calculated stalking of Diana, cold-blooded as his pursuit of a deer across the Balmoral estate, was as wickedly selfish an example of exploitation of an innocent and trusting teenage girl as it is possible to imagine. That the plot was effectively hatched in the bed of his mistress made it even uglier.
It was already clear to many of their contemporaries who had watched the public humiliation of Andrew Parker Bowles as the prince and his concubine frantically kissed and groped one another on the dance floor throughout the prestigious Cirencester Polo Club Ball in 1979, that the pair would sacrifice anyone’s feelings, together with their own honor and decency, on the altar of their mutual desire. Observers found it an unpleasant and disturbing spectacle. But the treatment they were to mete out to Diana over the next fifteen years made their tormenting of Andrew Parker Bowles appear no more than a little harmless fun in comparison.
For a young woman, starved of affection and longing to be loved by anyone, it really seemed like a fairy tale come true when the handsome prince—the world’s most eligible bachelor who would one day be king and make her his queen—said he had fallen in love with her. It was, she told her friends, just too fabulous to be true. And she was right. From the very outset, this cold-hearted, self-centered and self-serving man—reciting the words supplied by his equally selfish paramour—courted Diana with deliberate lies.
King Richard III is generally considered the most heartless and villainous monarch in British history. Yet there is no doubt that even he would have bowed an admiring knee to the distant successor to his throne in recognition of Charles’s pitiless, calculated and cold-blooded treatment of Lady Diana Spencer.
It is important, if one is to understand the intense bitterness which eventually existed between Charles and Diana, between their two households and among the courtiers as a whole, that one recognizes the appalling nature of Charles and Camilla’s treatment of Diana, and that the princess was aware of their relationship even before her marriage. Only then can one appreciate the motivation behind the Princess of Wales’s vendetta against Charles, her paranoia and her need for revenge against the whole family—conditions which made Diana’s removal not merely a viable, but increasingly a desirable option in some royal quarters.
In the last decade of her life, Diana had permitted her sexual exploits to run riot: she had ten different lovers in as many years. After her separation and divorce from Charles, her behavior became more irresponsible and unpredictable as her need for revenge rather than justice became established. She deliberately sought ways to shock and distress the royal family and, in rapid succession, she took a married English lover and became heavily involved with two Pakistanis and an Egyptian. This, she was certain, would particularly upset Prince Philip whom she was convinced was a racist.
What is still undeniable is that when she was killed, Diana was planning to marry Dodi Fayed. the Egyptian playboy, film producer and son of Harrods boss Mohamed Al Fayed. Diana intended moving to California where they would make their main home. Key staff in London had already been alerted about the move to Dodi’s £4.5 million villa. Whether or not the wedding would have finally taken place is uncertain—but it was undeniably her intention at the time of her death.
These facts alone would have provided sufficient reason for some people to get rid of the princess. There are those who could not stomach the future king’s mother being married to a foreign non-Christian. Security chiefs, for example, were concerned that the future monarch would have to travel abroad to visit his mother.
Other people in palace circles were deeply concerned about Diana’s existing relationship with her eldest son, and the long-term effect it would have on him. William was barely fifteen, but for some time Diana had been confiding in him as though he were already an adult. To show she was a “cool” mum, she apparently allowed him soft porn magazines, typical among boys of his age increasingly interested in sex. More importantly she had made him the reluctant recipient of her most bizarre confidences, which streamed uncensored from her tortured psyche and included details of her sexual activities with her various lovers.
William had the remarkable sensitivity to react with cries for help on his mother’s behalf, though these produced more condemnation for her use—and abuse—of William than sympathy for his mother. They viewed the mother–son relationship through darkly critical eyes, and calculated the damage being done to the future king.
As if further complications were needed, the medical assistant from University College Hospital, who helped prepare her body for embalming, believed Diana was pregnant at the time of her death. The baby would have been an illegitimate half-brother, or half-sister, for William and Harry, and his father would have been neither British-born nor Christian.
A bungled attempt to cover up a suspected pregnancy had taken place in Paris before Diana’s body was flown back to England. Partial embalming was authorized by the St. James’s Palace office. While admittedly the father of her two children, as it happens Charles was no longer Diana’s next of kin and thus had no legal right to authorize such a medical interference. Because of their divorce he was in fact no longer related to her in any way.
Commander Mules confirmed in Paris that the embalming decision was made by a much higher authority than him before the body was released. Without the permission of her next of kin, the tissue removal and the changes brought about by the introduction of embalming fluids became criminal assault—though it is unlikely that even Scotland Yard would have the courage to press charges. In 2003 it was revealed that the Princess went into a London hospital, only days before her last trip with Dodi, to undergo a pregnancy scan.
Yet, in some quarters, even these unwelcome revelations were not believed to compare in their effect with the disclosures contained in secret tapes and videos which formed part of the Diana testament. These recordings were part of the contents of a closely guarded mahogany box, assembled by Diana to provide her with “insurance” against the feared assassins. She called the contents of this box her “Crown Jewels,” and kept them in a locked safe. After her death the box was claimed by her sister, Lady Sarah McCorquodale. The contents were still intact when she checked it.
But when the box reached the Spencer estate at Althorp, it was empty.
Missing were an inscribed signet ring given to her by her former lover Major James Hewitt, several handwritten letters from Hewitt and senior members of the royal family, some twenty videotapes which were recorded in Kensington Palace when she was at her lowest ebb and which are a terrifyingly frank account of her marriage told in agonizing detail, and a single cassette audiotape which was a recording of her interview with former royal valet George Smith.
Some of the videos also referred to the interviews she conducted with George Smith at his home in Kensington Palace in 1996 and at the Priory, a private clinic, during a time when he was receiving treatment at Prince Charles’s expense. Diana recorded Smith’s allegations of having been raped on two occasions by a royal aide. A secret palace inquiry found there was no foundation to the allegations.
It was police knowledge of Diana’s tapes which eventually led to an official investigation in 2001. It was dropped when Smith refused to press charges. Prince Charles had already spent £100,000 on legal fees in relation to this matter.
But Diana had also taped evidence from George Smith of a potentially far more damaging episode, allegedly witnessed by the valet. The police had been told of this, and they were searching for it when they burst into Burrell’s home in a dawn raid in 2001.
It was this particular incident—in which Smith alleges he had discovered Prince Charles and a senior royal aide cuddled together and stark naked in bed—that courtiers described as a time bomb ticking under the throne.
This was a devastating accusation, and since 1996 senior royals and the courtiers who chose to support their continued existence, had been terrified of it becoming public knowledge.
Charles was on record as saying that it was only this aide whom he trusted to squeeze his toothpaste onto his brush. He had also, he said, allowed the aide to assist him in directing a urine sample into a bottle for medical tests.
This tape, Diana’s traumatic account of her marriage, and reports of her secret relationship with the Queen’s nephew, Viscount Linley, another huge skeleton rattling hard to come out of the royal family’s closet and threaten further intense scandal, are the catastrophic revelations which the royal family believed must be prevented from leaking out at any cost, and are the real reasons why the Burrell trial had to be stopped. Viscount Linley denied any intimate relationship with Diana, saying that he and his cousin-in-law “were just good friends.”
Prince Charles and the aide have both described George Smith’s allegation as preposterous, and deny the incident ever took place. Certainly it is not alleged that any illegal act occurred.
Smith clearly remembers Diana “lapsing deeply into thought,” rather than being distressed, by his recounting of this story. Her recordings, which contain her own account of how a palace cover-up was organized to hush up all Smith’s allegations, coupled with other revelations about the royals and a handwritten letter from James Hewitt, made suppression of the contents of Diana’s wooden box, if not in themselves a fully valid reason for having her killed, then in some quarters a good enough contributory reason for doing so.
It seems barely credible, in just eighteen years, that Diana could have metamorphosed from the unknown and extremely innocent teenager she was when Prince Charles first met her, to the woman—so worshipped and desired by so many, so hated and reviled by a very powerful few—she had become on the day of her murder in August 1997.
ONE
Those who know the couple well say that after Charles spotted Diana at a weekend house party in West Sussex, where they were fellow guests, he showed uncharacteristic excitement. Even Diana herself remembered, “He was all over me like a rash—almost leaped on me there and then.” It was not the kind of princely behavior she had been warned to expect by her two sisters, Jane and Sarah, who, having themselves failed to “bag” the royal heir, had already groomed their baby sister for her turn, should the chance arise.
As it happened, Diana’s feelings and intentions were irrelevant. Charles had discovered a candidate for matrimony who fulfilled all the criteria defined by Camilla Parker Bowles, and it was this that had prompted his enthusiasm.
Diana turned down his invitation to drive her back to London—another tip from her sisters was not to be too compliant—and Charles returned to Buckingham Palace alone, from where he telephoned his mistress to report his “find.” Lady Diana Spencer, he told her, had all the wifely attributes they were seeking: she was a virgin without a past, and came from good, blue-blooded breeding stock.
Mrs. Parker Bowles immediately set about stage-managing the royal suitor’s next moves in the wooing of their chosen bride. After a night of Verdi at the Albert Hall, Diana was invited to Cowes week aboard the royal yacht
Britannia,
and the cruise to Scotland which traditionally followed. This trip and the following spell in Balmoral was the testing period with the royal family: Diana passed with flying colors. Even Prince Philip, who had despaired of his eldest son ever taking a wife, was fulsome in his approval. “She can provide the family with some height,” he commented—putting her about on a par with a brood mare. Yet this parental approval, though important, was insignificant to Charles compared with the real test.
Mrs. Parker Bowles and her husband were part of the Balmoral house party, and this would be Camilla’s first chance to vet Diana in person. Her judgment, a rare miscalculation for Camilla, was that Diana was a mouse: ideal wife fodder who was incapable of breaking her stranglehold on the prince.
Cheered by Camilla’s overwhelmingly favorable verdict, Charles sent Diana packing back to London escorted by, of all people, Andrew Parker Bowles, while he and his mistress—with typical lack of discretion—got on with their love affair.
During this wooing period, Diana had to put up with weekend after weekend at Bolehyde as a guest of the Parker Bowleses and with Camilla’s neverending advice to her on how best to get along with Charles. She learned that it was Camilla who had helped Charles choose Highgrove, a nine-bedroom Georgian mansion set in 350 acres, which was small for the heir to the throne but perfect for the prince’s immediate needs. It was just a few minutes drive from the Parker Bowles house—and the woman with whom he had become totally besotted. It was Camilla, too, who had advised on its decoration. When Charles took Diana to the races, the chaperone he chose to be with them was Mrs. Parker Bowles. And it was to Camilla’s home that they returned afterward—not Highgrove.
Diana was not the brightest girl in her class, but even she was capable, before long, of recognizing what was going on between her suitor and his friend’s wife. Despite this, she still had dreams of her own to fulfill, paramount being her vision of becoming Queen of England. So she said nothing and prayed that the affair would not become as obvious to the general public as it was to her. It is quite unforgivable that, at this stage, her mother, who knew exactly what the relationship was between Charles and Camilla, did not warn Diana off. She urged caution, as any mother might have done, but despite knowing everything she said nothing that really counted.
Diana’s grandmother, Lady Fermoy, was more to the point. “I don’t think marrying into the royal family will suit you,” she told Diana. “Their sense of humor and their lifestyle are very different.” But by then it was already too late to protect her. Diana had been made painfully aware, courtesy of the
Sunday Mirror
on November 16, 1980, that her boyfriend—her first ever boyfriend—was sleeping with another woman.
The
Sunday Mirror
exclusive was that on the night after attending Princess Margaret’s party at the Ritz Hotel with Charles, Diana had slipped down to Staverton in Wiltshire, where the prince had been entertaining Duchy of Cornwall officials, and sneaked aboard the royal train which was parked overnight in a siding. She and Charles, it suggested, had secretly spent the night together as lovers.
Six people knew for certain the story was untrue: Diana and her three flatmates who were in their Chelsea apartment watching television; Charles, who, the official train telephone log showed, had made a late-night call to the Parker Bowles home—and Camilla, the blonde-haired woman in the
Sunday Mirror
story, who had immediately dashed across country to be with her lover.
Charles displayed his fury to the
Sunday Mirror
and its then editor, Bob Edwards, and ordered the palace press secretary, Michael Shea, to denounce the story as a complete fabrication. This deliberate lie, not the first and certainly not the last he would tell about his relationship with Camilla, was hardly the conduct to be expected from a future king.
Diana, anxious not to be labeled a hussy, but stopping short of revealing the mystery blonde’s real identity—of which she had no doubts at all—for the first time telephoned a royal correspondent, James Whitaker of the
Daily Mirror
, and told him, “It isn’t true. I stayed in all night with my friends. We never left the flat. Believe me. I am not a liar.”
At Charles’s insistence a complaint was made to the Press Council, but the palace press office—made aware by the security services of the real facts—said they would not proceed with the matter.
The one man to suffer from the deception was Bob Edwards, a decent editor whose integrity and judgment had been seriously undermined by the prince’s actions. It was months before he learned the truth and six years before the palace “apologized” by awarding him a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) for outstanding services to journalism.
Diana never did receive an explanation from the prince. In fact she didn’t see Charles again for several weeks. On New Year’s Day 1981 she was invited to Sandringham. Had she expected his proposal at the Queen’s Norfolk home then she was to be disappointed. Despite Prince Philip’s obvious frustration at his son’s reluctance to take his growled advice—“For God’s sake, bloody well get on with it”—Charles let the moment pass by. He already had a most enviable lifestyle and the perfect mistress, so why change things?
It was only at Camilla’s urging that the reluctant prince unenthusiastically agreed to propose on his return from a skiing trip in February. But it was not until three days after his return from the ski slopes of Klosters that Charles finally sent for Diana.
He had chosen Windsor Castle as the best setting, historically, for his proposal. Considering the purpose of the meeting, it was arranged in a rather old-fashioned, heavy-handed, master-to-servant fashion. The order to attend was not presented as an invitation, Diana recalled later. “It was a royal command.” And what should have been a joyous occasion was made tense and unnatural by Prince Charles’s inability to relax. He was stiffly formal throughout, she remembered, and did not kiss her or hug her or acknowledge her arrival with a touch of any kind. He asked her so suddenly, “Will you marry me?” that she burst out laughing.
“Yeah, OK,” she replied, still giggling—not completely sure that it wasn’t all some bizarre kind of joke.
Charles was not laughing. “You do realize that one day you will be queen?” he rebuked her.
“Yes,” she said again, this time more meekly and not laughing at all.
It seemed enough for Charles, and he went straight off to another room in the castle to telephone his mother with the news. Diana was not required to speak to her future mother-in-law. To the prince it was “done and dusted,” and he made no attempt to speak to her again for some time, even when she flew off to Australia to “get her breath back” and come to terms with the dramatically altered direction her life was about to take.
When, after a week of not hearing from him, and in desperation to speak to the man she thought loved her, Diana called Buckingham Palace, she was told he couldn’t be found. He briefly returned her call the following day.
On her return to England she was welcomed home not by Charles but by one of his aides bearing flowers. She was left pretty much to her own devices until February 28, 1981, the day of the formal announcement of the engagement.
Their awkwardness, almost shyness, as they stood together before the TV cameras and the press for the first time could be best explained not by nerves but by the fact that they were each, publicly, making a lifetime’s commitment to an almost complete stranger with whom they had virtually nothing in common. When the Prince of Wales was asked “Are you in love?,” he could only manage a stammered, “Whatever ‘in love’ means” in reply. The feeble answer returned a thousand times or more to torment Diana during the next few months, and for the whole of her marriage.
After the press conference, Diana found herself bundled off to Clarence House, the Queen Mother’s residence a few hundred yards from Buckingham Palace, where a suite of rooms had been made available for her. No member of the royal family, nor any of her friends, was there to offer support or reassurance; she had only learned of the move herself that morning. There was, however, one letter waiting for her, which had been written days earlier. It was from Camilla, who had known, well in advance, exactly where she would be staying, and it contained an invitation to lunch. If Diana had thought public recognition of her engagement to Charles would cool the ardor of the lovers and force an end to Camilla’s participation in both their lives, she realized then that she was very much mistaken.
Shortly after this, Charles flew to Australia for a five-week royal tour. His farewell to Diana at Heathrow Airport was short and lacking in intimacy on his part, though she shed some tears. It was in marked contrast to the display of passion Charles had exhibited in Buckingham Palace a few hours earlier when Camilla had called to say goodbye. Diana had been with him in his office when the call came in, and had been forced to endure a gushingly sentimental farewell to his mistress which the prince had made no effort to disguise. It had left her angry, humiliated and tearful—and no doubt provided the real reason for those tears at the airport. It was a foretaste, Diana feared, of what life with Charles was going to become. It ripped apart her confidence and made her seriously question his real feelings for her.
Between then and the wedding very little happened to make her think differently. In the weeks after Charles returned from Australia he probably saw more of Camilla than he did of his fiancée—and the effect of this on Diana was punitive. The first real and visible manifestation of this newly created stress was the onset of bulimia. She had, by this time, moved into Buckingham Palace, with rooms close to the old nursery kitchen. There, several times a day, and often at night, she would have gorging sessions, wolfing down huge portions of rich food. These would be immediately followed by vomiting bouts in her private lavatory.
The servants who witnessed her binges and cleaned up her mess said nothing, and, as nobody in the palace apart from them knew what was happening to the desperately unhappy teenager, neither did anyone else.
The only two people having any doubts at all about the wisdom of what they were doing were the couple themselves. Both were having serious misgivings about the wisdom of going through with the marriage. Charles admitted to himself, only at this very late stage, that he shared not a single interest with this very young, very naive girl—and that at times he could barely tolerate being with her.
For her part, Diana had concluded that she was worthless as a wife for the prince. Why else would her fiancé prefer to make love to an overweight, rather plain middle-aged housewife?
Correctly recognizing the catastrophe which lay ahead if the marriage were permitted to take place, Charles went to his parents and expressed his doubts. Prince Philip became so angry and abusive that his eldest son fled the room in terror. Looking for sympathy and solace, Charles next turned to Camilla for comfort. He was horrified when her reaction was equally as violent as that of his father. She knew far better than the prince what was good for him, she lectured. Didn’t he trust her to do the right thing for him? Camilla refused to speak to him again until he came to his senses.
Diana fared no better.
Just three weeks before the wedding, and almost as a belated twentieth birthday party for Diana, the royals held a formal, white-tie-and-tails banquet at Windsor Castle where the thousand guests were entertained by Elton John. As a clear sign of things to come, Charles did not dance once with Diana, and went to bed early. She danced crazily in the disco until five in the morning, long after the other guests and even the servants had gone home. Then she drove home to her father at Althorp and told him that the wedding was off.
It would certainly have been more to his credit, and a far more fatherly gesture, had Earl Spencer heeded his youngest daughter’s cry for help, put her happiness first, and called the whole thing off on Diana’s behalf. Instead he spent the weekend convincing her that everything would be alright, that she was doing the right thing, and that it was her duty as a Spencer to return to London and fulfill her destiny.