Back at Buckingham Palace, where no comment was made by anyone concerning her runaway weekend, Diana invited her sisters to lunch and, just two days before her wedding day, begged for their support in calling it off. Believing her to be exhibiting simple, and very normal, pre-nuptial nerves, they were flippant, but adamant. “Your face is on the tea towels, it’s too late to chicken out now.” Jane and Sarah advised Diana that, in the end, Charles would not let her down.
They could not have been more appallingly wrong, as Charles himself confirmed five days before the wedding when he visited Broadlands and told Lord Mountbatten’s grandson, Lord Romsey, that Camilla Parker Bowles was the only woman he had ever loved. “I could never feel the same way about Diana as I feel about Camilla,” he confessed.
Desperately wanting to believe her sisters, Diana, not for the first time and certainly not for the last, put on a brave smile and that night looked radiant standing alongside the Prince of Wales at the head of the grand staircase in Buckingham Palace to receive eight hundred guests at a ball. Nancy Reagan was a guest of honor. Another honored guest, who shared the vintage Krug champagne and was entertained by the then popular group Hot Chocolate, was Mrs. Camilla Parker Bowles. Diana was determined not to allow her rival to spoil her evening, and was still smiling when she left in the early hours to Clarence House where she would spend her last day as a single woman.
For his part, Charles had no intention of remaining a single man that night. He returned to his suite in Buckingham Palace with Camilla, and they spent the rest of that night, according to his valet, making love. It was a staggering betrayal—not just of his bride, which was reprehensible, but of the Queen, the Church, the Archbishop of Canterbury (who would be officiating at his marriage to Diana in a little over twenty-four hours) and the whole nation, who genuinely believed he was giving himself, in all honesty and in the name of true love, to Lady Diana Spencer.
It would be many years before Diana found out about Charles’s last, perfidious piece of treachery as a bachelor, but its effect on her was no less painful, the betrayal no less callous. Perhaps the princess felt some satisfaction at having had Camilla’s name removed from the list of palace guests at the celebratory breakfast which followed their actual wedding—but it was pitiful revenge for such sickening behavior on the part of Charles and his mistress.
TWO
“There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.”
Princess Diana’s unforgettable declaration to Martin Bashir during the
Panorama
television interview in November 1995 was deliberately intended to throw Camilla Parker Bowles into the public spotlight, and in so doing make her public enemy number one. In both respects it succeeded, demonizing Camilla and, in the process, making Prince Charles the unquestionable villain of the royal marriage collapse.
It also prompted the queen to order their immediate divorce.
Diana did not escape the fallout unscathed. Supporters of Charles labeled her a woman in the advanced stages of paranoia, increasingly unstable and suffering from mental illness. But of far more importance to her was that she had made the first move to avenge fifteen years of almost uninterrupted despair and depression—loneliness and misery created uncaringly by her husband and his mistress. Not even the swearing of the sacred vows, made before God and the people during their marriage service in return for the blessing on their union from the Archbishop of Canterbury, had prevented Charles from taking Camilla with them on their honeymoon.
The newlywed Waleses were barely into their second day aboard the royal yacht
Britannia
, which they had joined at Gibraltar, when they had their first confrontation. Inevitably it concerned Camilla. Prized photographs of his paramour, which Charles kept in his diary, had fallen out while he was discussing his itinerary with Diana, and when she challenged him to give his reasons for carrying them, he refused even to discuss his friendship with Camilla. It ended in Diana going to bed in tears and Charles sleeping alone.
Diana blamed this incident for triggering a fresh outbreak of bulimia nervosa—her worst to date. She found herself frantically stuffing herself to capacity four or five times a day before inducing vomiting only minutes later. Far from attempting to comfort her and provide the simple reassurance that she held a special place in his affections, Charles’s almost sadistic reaction was again to emphasize Camilla’s importance to him by wearing her gift of a pair of gold cufflinks, each in the form of interlinked Cs—unsubtle reminders of the powerful and exclusive bond between them.
Had the marriage not by then been consummated—itself an unmemorable event, she recalled later—she would have refused him the questionable pleasure of exercising his marital rights. She told Andrew Morton, years later, “He was the man I wanted to be with for the rest of my life, and I was willing to jump through any hoop and over any hurdle to win him.” But she was not prepared to be his second choice within her own marriage.
After their trying Mediterranean cruise they flew to Balmoral to continue a honeymoon that had become as idyllic as an endurance test, two strangers locked in a masquerade of intimacy. The situation would have been glaringly obvious to any other family in the land, but went completely unnoticed by Prince Philip, the Queen and the other members of the royal family on holiday there. The firm family rule on emotion was to “lock it in.” No one was ever supposed to know what any of them was really feeling. “As the latest member of the family I would have been ignored anyway,” Diana herself recalled. “Nothing I had to say was worth listening to.”
After ten weeks of marriage, Diana was a changed person. Her waist was by now more than seven inches smaller than on the day her engagement had been announced, and she had lost so much weight she resembled little more than skin and bones. Her constant jealousy of Camilla, physically absent but permanently, it appeared to Diana, standing between herself and her husband, was the cause of endless fights and her ever-worsening bulimia. The illness sapped her strength and confidence, and she was barely able to speak to other members of the family, but amazingly no one but Charles even seemed to notice. More amazing still, from Diana’s point of view, was that she found herself just as much in love with her prince as at the outset.
The public had never doubted it. They believed wholeheartedly in the fairy-tale aspect of the romance and marriage, exactly as it had been presented in the press, and their demand for fresh information about the new Princess of Wales was unprecedented. Bewildered newspaper editors, faced with the daily call for more pictures and stories, were starting to accept that Dianamania was here to stay.
All that was required to make reality match the public illusion and turn the marriage into a brilliant success was an injection of romance from Charles, and a frank admission from him that Camilla had been dumped for good. Tragically for them both, and for a nation of well-wishers, Charles was emotionally too miserly to make the effort. Diana had to make do with his hurtful indifference and his heartbreaking but categorical refusal to end his relationship with Camilla.
The princess’s private secretary, Patrick Jephson, was later to conclude that her approach to love had been conditioned by long-suppressed traumas in her early life. They had permanently damaged her ability to give or receive love. Suicidal because of her desperate need for help, confused by the contrast between Charles’s callous insensitivity and the public’s deification of her, an extremely unhappy Diana flew to London early in October to seek professional counseling. The doctors and psychologists who were called to examine her at Buckingham Palace diagnosed various tranquilizers to stabilize her condition. Diana refused to take any of them. She did not need drugs, she told them. She needed time alone with her husband to work things out, and she needed regular affection. The doctors insisted but Diana refused.
It was an impasse only broken when the princess discovered she was pregnant. Long before his birth she had something to thank William for, she would remark years later. With her condition confirmed, there was no question of her taking drugs, Diana told the doctors triumphantly. They might harm her unborn baby—possibly their future king.
Being pregnant produced an immediate surge of hope and optimism in the princess, who truly believed it would provide the elusive catalyst which would inject the missing spark into her marriage. But, as on most other occasions when she hoped her marriage would take a turn for the better, she was to be bitterly disappointed.
Having survived the honeymoon and the temper tantrums of the woman he now compared to an alien being, Charles was also in need of a reassuring cuddle and the unrestrained and undemanding affection of someone who loved him unreservedly. Only one woman could fulfil these needs for Charles: Camilla Parker Bowles.
Thus, on November 2, 1981, three days before the world learned that his wife was expecting their first child, Charles was back in the arms of his mistress, with whom he had secretly arranged a rendezvous during the meet of the Vale of the White Horse Hunt near Cirencester. It was never a real contest: Camilla’s voluptuous curves versus Diana’s skeletal form; the passionate, sexually arousing grown-up woman versus the bashfully uncertain, naive, sexually unskilled ingénue. After four months in denial, Charles was again in the secure embrace of his one great love—and he determined never to be separated from her again.
Diana did not discover that Charles had renewed his adulterous relationship with Camilla for another eight months, after the birth of Prince William in June 1982, but she seemed to know, instinctively, that he was being unfaithful, and constantly accused him, even without evidence, of betraying her.
After one particularly vocal and unpleasant row at Sandringham where they were celebrating their first New Year as a married couple, Diana, now three months pregnant and suffering the most appalling morning sickness, was heard to scream that she intended to kill herself. When Charles called her bluff, she hurled herself down a shallow flight of wooden stairs, landing in a bundle at the bottom, where she was found by a horrified Queen Mother. Incredibly, even though a local doctor and Diana’s gynecologist had been urgently summoned, Charles simply walked away from his bruised and sobbing wife and went riding. It was to become his pattern of behavior for similar future incidents, of which there were to be several.
These “suicide bids” occurred over the next few years. They were never serious attempts to take her own life, but were rather cries for help from an increasingly desperate and isolated young woman. They were cries that went unheeded because Charles refused to take them seriously. He treated each attempt with either scorn or indifference, or a mixture of the two, even though on one occasion she slashed her wrists with a razor blade and on another cut her breast and thighs with a penknife, drawing blood. He simply chose to ignore her, as he did when she made enormous efforts to do the right thing in public. She told a friend that she was trying so damn hard and all she needed was a pat on the back, like a dutiful horse. But it was not forthcoming.
It was immensely stressful for such a naturally shy person as Diana to thrust herself onto the center stage, and if Charles seemed oblivious to the pains she was taking over her royal duties, Diana soon recognized, with growing satisfaction, that the public more than appreciated her efforts. It soon became apparent that it was her, and not Charles, whom the crowds had turned out to see.
After William’s birth, which briefly gave them one joint achievement they could celebrate together, the couple were rarely in accord, and less than a year after their wedding the royal couple found their marriage inexorably disintegrating. Postnatal depression and a new outbreak of bulimia had Diana in their grip and were eroding what few reserves of strength she had left. Perversely, what little energy remained to her she used to attack her husband, whom she had finally caught declaring his everlasting love for Camilla in a late-night telephone call from his bath. They had stopped sharing their four-poster marital bed even before William was born, and Charles slept in the spare bed in his dressing room. The staff knew this to be true because the prince’s threadbare Teddy now lived there when he was in Highgrove—Teddy was his companion everywhere he went, as housekeeper Wendy Berry remembered. The only person who was allowed to repair the ancient, patched-up cuddly toy was Charles’s nanny, Mabel Anderson.
Diana’s spirits briefly rallied after Andrew Parker Bowles was promoted to commanding officer of the Household Cavalry, and she learned that the Parker Bowleses were moving; but they sank as quickly when they bought Middlewick House near Corsham, even closer to Highgrove than before, and Charles became a frequent traveler along the twelve miles of roads separating the two homes.
His conjugal life with Diana was not quite over, however. She had given him an heir, but to be safe he still needed “a spare,” as Diana was later to describe their second-born. But after Harry was born in September 1984, the royal couple ceased making love together. Charles’s affair with Camilla Parker Bowles continued to be the major cause of their frequent, stormy confrontations, but although getting rid of Camilla was a very tall order for Diana, another task she was determined not to shirk was her planned purge of the Prince of Wales’s “Pink Mafia,” as she had dubbed his predominantly homosexual staff.
Lord Mountbatten, known affectionately around the palace as the biggest queen in the royal family, had surrounded Charles with homosexuals during the period when he had been entrusted by Queen Elizabeth with her eldest son’s social upbringing. Diana did not like the clique that was similarly intended to be around her two sons and had systematically got rid of over forty gay members of her husband’s staff by forcing resignations or personally firing them. She may have then had a reactionary hostility toward homosexuality that was later to transform in maturity to the affection for some gay men and her public support for HIV victims, but whatever the reason, the prince’s aides feared her and her legendary hot temper.
Diana in a fury became a screaming, door-slamming, foot-stamping harridan. Charles was determinedly and infuriatingly nonconfrontational. He would refuse to answer her questions or respond to her accusations, just turning his back and walking away from the fracas, leaving Diana even more spitting mad. “Above all else, she hated to be ignored,” said her former private secretary Patrick Jephson.
Wendy Berry, their Highgrove housekeeper, remembered, “The prince’s indifference would have been crushing for anyone. He was so aloof and uncaring. I began to see the absolute desperation and frustration felt by both the prince and the princess, having to live within a marriage that was patently falling apart at the seams.”
During their most blistering rows they didn’t care who heard them—even the children—and their language was straight from the gutter. Not for the first time the Highgrove staff watched as Prince Charles stormed out of the front door, jumped into his car and roared away down the drive. Diana was left at an open window screaming, “You’re a shit, Charles, an absolute shit.”
On another occasion she threw a teapot at him and marched away yelling, “You’re a fucking animal, Charles, and I hate you.”
Once, when she had answered him back with an expletive, he threw a wooden bootjack at her and shouted, “How dare you speak to me like that? Do you know who I am?” At times like this he could scarcely contain himself. American author Kitty Kelly reported that after one difficult exchange he stalked out of the room, strode into the bathroom, ripped the porcelain hand basin from the wall and smashed it on the floor. “You do understand, don’t you? Don’t you?” he asked his wide-eyed valet. Ken Stronach simply nodded.
It both baffled and angered Charles that this sick, unstable and remarkably unsophisticated woman—which is what he truly considered her to be—could be the object of such universal public adulation. With seemingly so little effort she could manipulate the crowds who were to be his, and not her, future subjects. The public and press were aware only of Diana—they wanted only
her
photograph,
her
reaction and
her
attention. In three years she had single-handedly resurrected the Windsors’ tarnished image and virtually nonexistent popularity, and yet the royal family offered her nothing in return but their criticism—and secretly their envy.