FOUR
“Oh, it’s a boy. And it’s even got red hair!”
Charles’s brief visit to Diana’s hospital bedside, and his even briefer verbal reaction—reported in its entirety above—to the birth of their second son before dashing off to play polo indicated to many, including the princess herself, the real moment when the Waleses’ marriage was irretrievably lost.
With his perfect mistress in place, Charles would have remained in his loveless marriage for the rest of his life and counted himself extremely lucky by royal standards. What had no part in his idyllic marital scenario was permitting Diana a liaison of her own. What was good for the gander was, in the prince’s opinion, unacceptable for the goose. As a future king, he felt entitled not only to have a mistress, but also to be as open about it as he pleased. On the other hand, his double standards demanded that his wife be utterly faithful. Ironically, he judged her by his own standards and found her guilty of infidelity with a man called Philip Dunne.
Dunne was the merchant-banker son of the lord lieutenant of Herefordshire. He had been introduced to Diana and Charles by newlyweds Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson when they had joined them at Klosters for their annual skiing holiday. They had turned up with a couple of spare men, one of whom was Dunne. Diana had found him charming and amusing and had spent a night chatting to him at a local discotheque. Another evening was spent playing schoolgirl games which involved mild flirtation, but nothing more serious.
Back in England, Dunne invited some of the skiing party for a weekend house party at his parents’ home, and when the press discovered that Charles was not present, and neither were Dunne’s parents, they concluded, wrongly, that Diana had finally found someone to help her through a rocky period in her marriage.
Charles was initially suspicious, but when Dunne explained that a whole group of guests had spent the weekend with him, he concluded, rightly, that Diana had not begun an affair with the younger man, though she clearly found him attractive. And had it not been for Charles’s own typically selfish behavior at the wedding of the Marquis of Worcester, son of the Duke of Beaufort, in June 1987, that is how it would have remained.
He spent the whole evening following the actual marriage ceremony talking to Camilla and ignored Diana completely. To be so publicly humiliated by the prince, yet again, was more than Diana could stomach and, white-lipped with anger, she pulled a surprised, but not reluctant, Philip Dunne on to the dance floor where they danced wildly together until dawn—long after Charles had slipped away with Camilla. Angered by his wife’s petulant and deliberate exhibitionism, which he believed was her attempt to embarrass him by flaunting her infidelity with Dunne in front of his friends and a generous portion of high-society England, Charles was now convinced that the couple had slept together.
Pausing only to collect Camilla, Charles headed for Balmoral on September 22 and began a separation from Diana which would end in questions being asked in parliament. Thirty-seven days went by, during which time the prince avoided all contact with his wife and sons. A brief get-together for a visit to Dyfed in Wales, which had been the victim of appalling floods, failed to convince the press that their marriage was in anything but dire straits. After six hours, during which they barely spoke a word to each other, Diana returned to London and Charles went back to Balmoral—and Camilla.
By February 1989, Diana was feeling sufficiently strong to have her first, and only, confrontation with Camilla. Treatment from Guy’s Hospital eating-disorders specialist Doctor Maurice Lipsedge had enabled her to bring the bulimia under control and, feeling more confident than she had done in years, Diana decided it was time to take Camilla Parker Bowles head on. She chose a party at Sir James Goldsmith’s home in Ormley Lodge, Richmond Park, to celebrate the fortieth birthday of Camilla’s sister, Annabel Elliott, as her battleground.
Charles, according to Diana’s personal protection officer Ken Wharfe, had not expected her to attend, and until the last moment—in the car taking them to the event—tried to dissuade her. But she coolly insisted, and caused surprise and even consternation among the other guests when she walked in with the prince. After dinner, Diana realized that Charles and Camilla had gone off together; summoning Ken Wharfe, she went downstairs in search of them, though a number of the guests tried to persuade her not to.
They found Charles and Camilla sitting in a softly lit children’s den, deep in conversation. At this point Ken Wharfe—not wanting to be part of a marital row—excused himself and waited by the basement steps outside the room. Minutes later, Diana appeared. She told him that she had confronted Camilla about her relationship with Charles. “It wasn’t a fight,” she said. “Calm, deathly calm, I said to Camilla, ‘I’m sorry I’m in the way. I obviously am in the way and it must be hell for both of you, but I do know what is going on. Don’t treat me like an idiot.’ ” Diana then returned to the party with her head held high, ignoring the fact that her confrontation with Camilla was the talk of the room. Charles and his mistress returned shortly afterward, looking shaken, and spent the rest of the evening circulating separately.
On the journey home, Diana could only repeat over and over to a silent Prince Charles, “How could you have done this to me? It was so humiliating. How could you?” Wharfe believed that what tore the princess in two, wrecking her emotionally, was their readiness to humble her publicly without apparent remorse. From that night on she only ever referred to Camilla by her new nickname: the Rottweiler.
The tension within the household became so unbearable that Wendy Berry’s son, James, quit as a valet. He told her, “I’ve got to the stage where I just can’t respect the prince or the princess any more. Their unhappy lives are destroying my own, and I don’t want to be caught in the crossfire.”
At that time, Charles had more than forty silver-framed photographs adorning various surfaces in his private study at Highgrove. There were photographs of the royal family and his sons, and various pictures of his favorite horses and dogs. But there was not a single picture of his wife—ironically the world’s most photographed woman.
In a sad little memoir Andrew Jacques, the local police constable who had guarded Highgrove for four years, wrote that the only times Charles and Diana met was at meal times, which very often ended in a blazing row for all to hear. “They never smile, laugh, or do anything together. In four years I only ever saw him kiss her goodbye once, and that was a peck on the cheek.”
The following summer, Charles suffered a ghastly tumble from his polo pony. He broke his arm so badly that part of the bone was protruding from the flesh below his elbow. It was a complicated break in two places, and set so badly the first time that the bone had to be rebroken and set with the aid of a metal pin and bone from the prince’s hip, which was grafted on. Add to this a tendon which became trapped in the fracture, with the bone healing around it, and for Charles it signified a long period of permanent pain.
Diana was with him for both operations in July and September, and personally escorted him back to Highgrove. But each time, after about an hour, she left him there and returned to London, with hardly a civil word having been exchanged between them. Moments after she left, Mrs. Parker Bowles would be driven in through the gates of Highgrove by Charles’s detective.
For most of that summer Charles and Camilla lived at Highgrove virtually as man and wife. Friends viewed her as his official hostess in Gloucestershire, and she organized parties and dinners in his home. When Diana made one of her very infrequent and unwelcome visits there, Camilla would dash home until her rival had gone back to London, and then resume her place as Charles’s nurse and comforter.
Despite this blissful domestic scene, Charles was increasingly subject to bouts of deep depression, a condition, his doctors believed, which could have been brought on by delayed shock from his polo accident. However, for whatever reason, it was now Charles’s turn to suffer from the pressure. By the end of that summer he was displaying all the symptoms of going through a nervous breakdown, and he was unable to fulfill an official function of any kind for four months.
He holed up in Balmoral with Camilla and Patsy Palmer-Tompkinson, and scared friends and courtiers alike by sinking ever deeper into depression. But even at such a low ebb he was still unable to find any blame, within his own behavior, to explain his marital problems. It was all Diana’s fault, he maintained, and his friends commiserated. It was Diana, they agreed, who received all the adulation and press attention, and Diana who devoted every second, it appeared, to upstaging her dejected husband. She had become his nemesis, his torturer, his personal hell on earth. However hard he tried to capture the public imagination, nobody appeared to care a damn. All they ever wanted was Diana. The damage to his pride was substantial, and his jealousy of his despised wife became overwhelming.
After two months in Scotland, followed by a few brief hours with Diana and their sons, Charles flew to the South of France. The ache in his arm still troubled him, and he now suffered an added pain in his hip from where the bone had been removed to graft his broken arm. He took with him a physiotherapist who helped reduce the aches and pains, but he could find no one to relieve his mental anguish.
After a week the prince returned home, too restless and troubled to enjoy the sun and the stunning views from Baroness Louise de Waldner’s chateau near Avignon which she had made available to him at Camilla’s urging. What tormented Charles the most was that he genuinely believed Diana had understood the ground rules of royal marriage before their wedding. It was for this reason that he was so bewildered, and angered, by the constant tantrums surrounding his relationship with Mrs. Parker Bowles.
Diana, on the other hand, amazingly still believed that the marriage could be saved, and told her confidants, including her royal protection officer, that if she showed enough love for her husband then he would surely start to love her back and no longer feel the need for a mistress. For her it was still not too late to rule out a “happily ever after” scenario. Or at least so she maintained.
Diana’s displays of affection were rare, but occasionally, said Wendy Berry, she would run up to him out in the garden and fling her arms around him. Charles would either appear embarrassed, or make a half-hearted attempt to reciprocate—but he always seemed distracted when he did so. When he did this, Diana would storm off, leaving Charles calling after her, “Darling, come back. Of course I want to hug you.”
She even proposed trying for another baby, and outwardly claimed she saw no problem in achieving this, even though she and the prince had not shared a marital bed for more than three years. Charles’s response to her baby proposal was to disappear to Florence on another holiday with Camilla. It was his way of drawing up the battle lines for the start of one of the stormiest periods of their marriage.
Princess Diana’s reaction was to embark on her first real love affair.
She had met James Hewitt, a dashing young cavalry officer in the Life Guards, a charming and very likeable man, in the summer of 1986. Diana was terrified of horses and had mistrusted them from childhood. Hewitt gave her riding lessons until she became fairly competent and no longer afraid of the beasts.
He was handsome. More importantly, he was energetic and passionate—all the attributes missing in Charles. She adored him. He also taught her about love, and after two years they had developed an intense sexual relationship. For the first time in her life, Diana experienced in full what it was like to be with someone she loved and trusted and who loved her in equal measure.
Several people close to Diana, including her personal detective Ken Wharfe, say that Charles knew exactly what was going on between Hewitt and his wife. But he was happy for it to continue because it suited him: if another man was keeping his wife satisfied, it was less trouble for him.
They would frequently meet at his mother’s Devon cottage or in Kensington Palace where Hewitt would often spend the night. The princess was blissfully happy, and insisted on giving Hewitt many thousands of pounds in cash and gifts, including a new car. She bought him clothes, spending fortunes on Savile Row suits and handmade shoes. She chose shirts for him, and expensive cufflinks.
Hewitt was not exactly displaying conduct becoming an officer of the Life Guards, but it made Diana happy—and all her staff and friends remarked on her new determination, confidence and gaiety. Charles too noted the changes in his wife and recognized how the new “arrangement” in their marriage was helping them both to enjoy a happier, and certainly more relaxed, domestic life.
However, despite these positive changes, when she was not with Hewitt the princess still looked, at times, heart-rendingly sad and lonely. “There’s nothing I can do to reach Charles,” she told one confidant. “It just tears me apart to love him and know he loves someone else and doesn’t give a damn about me.” The hypocrisy of her situation in pursuing an affair with Hewitt while complaining of Charles’s adultery with Camilla never occurred to Diana. The prince’s betrayal of her simply exceeded any other hurt she had suffered in her short life, and returning such hurt to him in kind was never seen as sin, but justice.
On the negative side, for years now, ever since her affair became public knowledge, cruel and totally unsubstantiated rumors have circulated at candlelit dinner parties in Chelsea and over afternoon tea in the drawing rooms of Belgravia. This upper-class gossip focused on the similarity between Major Hewitt and young Prince Harry. There is no doubt that there is a strong likeness, but Prince Harry also happens to share the same look and mischievous expression as Diana’s younger sister. Also, we are assured, James Hewitt and Princess Diana did not meet and fall in love until after Harry was born, although unfounded rumors still persist that their real first meeting took place long before that.