Prince William

BEGINNINGS

There had been months of speculation in the press about where Diana’s first baby would be born. According to the tabloids, she and the Queen were locked in argument; the Princess of Wales wanted to have her baby in hospital but the Queen insisted the heir to the throne should be born at Buckingham Palace, where her own four children had been delivered.

Like so many royal stories over the years it was not quite true. Diana was under the care of Mr George Pinker, the Queen’s Surgeon-Gynaecologist – better known to the young mothers of west London as one of the senior consultants at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington. A delightful man, he’d been delivering babies there for twenty-four years, including those of the Duchess of Gloucester, Princess Michael of Kent and Princess Anne. There was never any doubt – or disagreement – about where this baby would be born. It would be delivered in the safety of a private room on the fourth floor of the Lindo Wing, with everything on hand in case of emergency.

So Prince William, who came into the world at three minutes past nine on the evening of Monday 21 June 1982, was the first direct heir to the throne to be born in a hospital. It was the first of many firsts for the healthy, 7 lb 1½ oz little boy, who genealogists declared would be the most British monarch since James I and the most English since Elizabeth I. He was 39 per cent English, 16 per cent Scottish, 6.25 per cent Irish and 6.25 per cent American. The remaining 32.5 per cent was German. To his parents he was quite simply the best thing that had ever happened to them.

When news reached the wider world that Diana had been taken to St Mary’s at five o’clock that morning, people flocked to the hospital, clutching Union Jacks and picnics, and set up camp in the street outside, just as they had for the wedding almost exactly a year before. Undaunted by the pouring rain they waited excitedly, transistor radios on, bottles of bubbly at the ready, and when news of the birth finally came, the cry went up: ‘It’s a boy! It’s a boy!’ Corks popped, to cheers and roars of delight and stirring rounds of ‘For she’s a jolly good fellow’ and ‘Rule Britannia’.

Heading home to Kensington Palace a couple of hours later, Charles was greeted by about five hundred well-wishers and a host of journalists. He looked exhausted but flushed with excitement and pride. He had been with Diana throughout and would later tell friends about the thrill of seeing his son born, and what a life-changing experience it had been. ‘I’m obviously relieved and delighted,’ he said as the cameras flashed. ‘Sixteen hours is a long time to wait.’ And then, in typically philosophical mode, he added, ‘It’s rather a grown-up thing, I find – rather a shock to the system.’ ‘How was the baby?’ someone asked. ‘He looks marvellous; fair, sort of blondish. He’s not bad.’ When asked if he looked like his father, he added, ‘It has the good fortune not to.’ As for names, he said, ‘We’ve thought of one or two but there’s a bit of an argument about it. We’ll just have to wait and see.’

There were no crowd barriers outside the Lindo Wing and as people pushed in on Charles, the better to hear his answers, a woman suddenly lunged forward, flung her arms around the new father and kissed him firmly on the cheek, leaving a smudge of bright red lipstick. ‘Bloody hell,’ said the Prince with a wry smile, ‘Give us a chance!’ The crowd loved it and burst into song, like football supporters: ‘Nice one Charlie. Give us another one!’

As he slipped into a waiting car he appealed for quiet so that mother and baby could get some well-deserved rest. They had not been disturbed at all; their room on the fourth floor faced the opposite way. It was the other new mothers in the wing whose rooms overlooked the road he was concerned about.

Crowds had also gathered outside the gates of Buckingham Palace, where a self-appointed town crier was hoping to be heard above the noise of car horns and general merriment. At 10.25 p.m., in traditional style, the official announcement was posted on the gates. ‘Her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales was today safely delivered of a son at 9.03 p.m. Her Royal Highness and her child are both doing well.’ It was signed by Dr John Batten, head of the Queen’s Medical Household, Dr Clive Roberts, the anaesthetist, Dr David Harvey, the royal paediatrician, and Mr George Pinker.

The proud father was back the next morning at 8.45 a.m., by which time the police had brought in barriers to keep the enthusiasm less physical. Frances Shand Kydd, Diana’s mother, and her elder sister Lady Jane Fellowes, arrived about half an hour later. They left full of excitement. ‘My grandson is everything his father said last night,’ said Mrs Shand Kydd. ‘He’s a lovely baby. The Princess looked radiant, absolutely radiant. There’s a lot of happiness up there.’ The Queen was the next visitor. She arrived clutching a small present shortly before eleven o’clock and left twenty minutes later looking jubilant. The last familiar face to arrive was that of Earl Spencer, Diana’s father, who had survived a massive brain haemorrhage three years earlier and was universally admired for having valiantly walked his youngest daughter up the long aisle of St Paul’s Cathedral the previous July. He left the hospital repeating over and over, ‘He’s a lovely baby.’

Charles commented that his son was ‘looking a bit more human this morning’. Diana was well and recovering her strength and the baby ‘was in excellent form too, thank goodness.’ They were in such good form that in the afternoon mother and ‘Baby Wales’ went home. Diana was looking flushed and a little fragile, but also radiant. It had been a normal birth, albeit induced, relatively pain-free, thanks to an epidural spinal injection, and the baby, wrapped in a white blanket for the journey home, was breast-feeding well. Charles was carrying him as they came through the doors of the hospital, but soon handed him carefully to his mother. They smiled for the cameras and crowds, said their goodbyes to the staff who had come to see them off, and were whisked away by a waiting car.

It was unusual for a first-time mother to leave hospital so soon. Thirty years ago it was common practice to stay for five to eight days after the birth, but Diana’s home circumstances were rather special. As well as daily visits to Kensington Palace from Mr Pinker and Dr Harvey, she had the reassurance of a maternity nurse living in for the first few weeks while she established a routine. Sister Anne Wallace had previously worked for Princess Anne when her two children, Peter and Zara Phillips, were newborn.

Charles was overjoyed to have a family and quickly mastered the art of bathing the baby and nappy-changing. He had wanted children for years and was always quietly envious of his friends’ cosy domestic arrangements. Just days after the birth he wrote to his cousin Patricia Brabourne, ‘The arrival of our small son has been an astonishing experience and one that has meant more to me than I could ever have imagined. As so often happens in this life, you have to experience something before you are in a true position to understand or appreciate the full meaning of the whole thing. I am so thankful I was beside Diana’s bedside the whole time because by the end of the day I really felt as though I’d shared deeply in the birth and as a result was rewarded by seeing a small creature which belonged to us even though he seemed to belong to everyone else as well! I have never seen such scenes as there were outside the hospital when I left that night – everyone had gone berserk with excitement … Since then we’ve been overwhelmed by people’s reactions and thoroughly humbled. It really is quite extraordinary … I am so pleased you like the idea of Louis being one of William’s names. Oh! How I wish your papa could have lived to see him, but he probably knows anyway …’

Her papa was Lord Mountbatten of Burma, the Prince’s great-uncle, killed by an IRA bomb while setting out on a fishing trip off the coast of Ireland in August 1979. Patricia had also been in the boat, as had her twin fourteen-year-old sons, her husband, her mother-in-law and a local boy. Only she, her husband and one of the twins survived, all with terrible injuries. Mountbatten was the Prince’s ‘Honorary Grandfather’; he had been a mentor and friend and closer than any other member of his family; closer perhaps than anybody at all. His murder in such appalling circumstances had left the Prince completely grief-stricken.

It was almost a year after his death that Charles met Lady Diana Spencer, as she then was, at the house of mutual friends near Petworth in Sussex. He had just had a dramatic bust-up with Anna Wallace, the latest in a string of girlfriends, some more suitable than others. It was July 1980. They had met a few times before, but until that evening, Charles had never seen Diana as a possible girlfriend; she was, after all, twelve years younger than him, and when they’d first met he had been going out with her elder sister, Sarah. It was at Althorp, the Spencer family home in Northamptonshire, and Diana was a fourteen-year-old home from school. She was now nineteen, and while their hosts tended the barbecue, she and Charles sat side by side on a hay bale chatting. Charles brought up the subject of Mountbatten’s murder.

‘You looked so sad when you walked up the aisle at Lord Mountbatten’s funeral,’ she said. ‘It was the most tragic thing I’ve ever seen. My heart bled for you when I watched. I thought, It’s wrong, you’re lonely – you should be with somebody to look after you.’

Her words touched him deeply. He was lonely; he had lost the only person he felt understood him, the man who had been grandfather, great uncle, father, brother and friend. He had struggled so hard to hide his emotions on the day of the funeral, knowing how much his father disapproved of tears in a man.

On the evening he heard the news, he wrote in his journal, ‘Life has to go on, I suppose, but this afternoon I must confess I wanted it to stop. I felt supremely useless and powerless …

‘I have lost someone infinitely special in my life; someone who showed enormous affection, who told me unpleasant things I didn’t particularly want to hear, who gave praise where it was due as well as criticism; someone to whom I knew I could confide anything and from whom I would receive the wisest of counsel and advice.’

It was ironic that Diana’s sensitivity about Mountbatten was what triggered Charles’s interest in her as a future bride, since the old man would almost certainly have counselled against the match. He would have applauded Diana’s sweet nature, her youth, her beauty, her nobility and her virginity (important for an heir to the throne at that time), but he would have seen that the pair had too little in common to sustain a happy marriage.

He might also have seen that, despite the laughter and the charm, she had been damaged by her painful start in life, that she was vulnerable and needy. And he might have recognised that the Prince, with his own vulnerability and insecurity, would be the wrong person to cope with such a complex personality.

In his absence, there was no one who could offer advice of such a personal yet practical nature. His relationship with his parents had never been sufficiently close. There is no question that they loved their eldest son, but theirs is a family of poor communicators with a surprising dearth of emotional intelligence. He was brought up by nannies and had minimal contact with his parents, who were away for long periods during his childhood. As a little boy, there were occasions, friends remember, when his mother would sit Charles on her knee at teatime and play games with him, but she didn’t spend hours in the nursery (intimidated, they say, by the authoritarian nanny), and signs of overt affection stopped altogether as he grew older. His father was equally sparing with his affection. He was rough with Charles, baffled by a child who was so emotional and sensitive. According to witnesses, he often reduced him to tears. As a result, Charles was frightened of his father and desperate to please him, but was always left feeling that he was a disappointment.

Mountbatten, older, perhaps wiser, and with time on his hands in his retirement, saw that his great-nephew was in need of help and took the teenager under his wing for some much-needed understanding and direction. He criticised him on occasion, most notably for his selfishness, but he also made him feel he was loved and valued – something his parents had never managed to achieve. Where his father had cut him down, no doubt in an effort to make a man of him in the traditional mould, Mountbatten built up his confidence, listened to his doubts and fears. He rebuked him when he felt he had behaved badly, but overall he provided encouragement and praise. He was a sounding board for some of his more outlandish ideas, and a shoulder to cry on when things went wrong. He had been, in short, a good parent to Charles and his death was devastating.

Charles was lost and rudderless without him. He knew he had a duty to find a wife and to produce an heir, but his love life was a mess. He had pursued and fallen for a series of women, but the one he really loved and felt comfortable with was Camilla Parker Bowles. He had first fallen in love with her in the early 1970s when he was in the Navy, and her long-term boyfriend, Andrew, was stationed in Germany. She was then Camilla Shand and they enjoyed a happy time together but he felt he was too young and too uncertain to suggest marriage. When she announced her engagement to Andrew, just a few months after Charles took to the high seas, she broke his heart. He wrote forlornly to Mountbatten that it seemed cruel that ‘such a blissful, peaceful and mutually happy relationship’ should have lasted no longer than six months. ‘I suppose the feeling of emptiness will pass eventually,’ he added.

Her marriage, however, proved less than perfect and, while her husband pursued his Army career and other women, she was left alone in the country with their two children. Charles and Camilla’s friendship resumed. It was still mutually rewarding, but it could never progress to anything more. The Prince of Wales had been weaned on the story of the abdication and how the previous Prince of Wales’ obsession with Wallace Simpson, a twice-divorced American, had wreaked mayhem and nearly brought the monarchy to its knees. Camilla would always be close to his heart but he knew he had to find love and a wife elsewhere.

Less than seven months after their conversation on the hay bale, when Diana had touched him with her concern and empathy, Charles asked her to marry him. The amount of time they had spent alone during that period was minimal; they scarcely knew each other, but his hand had been forced by the combination of the press and poor communication.

He invited Diana to join him and his friends and family at Balmoral Castle, the Queen’s home in the Highlands of Scotland, where they traditionally stay during the summer. She was sweet and unsophisticated, bubbly and funny and everyone at the Castle that summer adored her. She was unlike anyone he had ever known and her interests and enthusiasms seemed to match his own.

She seemed like the answer to his prayers. Someone he could love, who was young enough to have no sexual past for the press to rake through, who would understand his world and be the perfect partner with whom to face the future. She was from the very top drawer of British aristocracy; as her father said at the time, ‘The average family wouldn’t know what hit them if their daughter married the future King … But some of my family go back to the Saxons – so that sort of thing’s not a bit new to me … Diana had to marry somebody and I’ve known and worked for the Queen since Diana was a baby.’

What he didn’t mention was that four of his Spencer ancestors were mistresses to English Kings in the seventeenth century; three to Charles II and one to James II, and the beautiful Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, daughter of the 1st Earl Spencer, was the talk of the nation in the eighteenth century and counted the future George IV among her many conquests.

While the women of the family frolicked with Kings and Princes, the Spencer men became courtiers, and Althorp, the family estate in Northamptonshire, must have had more royal visitors over the centuries than any other private house in Britain. Spencers have lived there since 1486, accumulating a fortune, historically from sheep farming, and filling it with fabulous works of art. It is now home to the 9th Earl, Diana’s brother, Charles, to whom the Queen is godmother.

Johnny Spencer, then Viscount Althorp, had been an equerry to both George VI and the Queen before his marriage in the 1950s. He was educated at Eton and Sandhurst and until he moved to Northamptonshire on his father’s death in 1975, he had rented a house from the Queen on the Sandringham estate, in Norfolk, where Diana lived until the age of fourteen. Park House was just across the park from the big house, and sometimes Diana and Prince Andrew, who were contemporaries, played together during the Royal Family’s regular stay at Sandringham over the New Year. There were links on her mother’s side of the family too. Her maternal grandmother, Ruth, Lady Fermoy, was a friend and ladyin-waiting to Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.

On paper she was the perfect match, but in reality the vulnerable Diana was anything but perfect as a bride to one of the most complex men in the country.

BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

Diana’s father was thirty-two when he married Frances Roche. She was eighteen; while her ancestry couldn’t compete with his for nobility, and is positively murky in patches, it did add a little colour to the picture, as well as some Scottish, Irish and American blood. The royal connection was comparatively new. Diana’s grandfather, Maurice, the 4th Baron Fermoy, became friendly with George V’s second son, Bertie, then Duke of York, when he and his wife moved to Norfolk. They played tennis together and their wives shared a passion for music; Ruth Fermoy, née Gill, an Aberdeen girl, was an exceptionally gifted pianist who’d been studying at the Paris Conservatoire under Alfred Cortot when they met. They moved from house to house in Norfolk until George V offered them Park House on the Sandringham estate (where Johnny and Frances later lived). Thus the Fermoys and the Yorks became neighbours and the friendship was sealed.

Frances was born there on the day George V died in 1936. It’s said that the news of her arrival was rushed across the park to Sandringham House where he lay gravely ill and that Queen Mary told him of her birth before he died that evening. When Bertie acceded as George VI after the abdication of his elder brother, Edward VIII, the friendship continued. During the war, Bertie and Maurice used to play ice hockey together against visiting American and Canadian troops on the frozen lakes at Sandringham, and Maurice was out hare shooting with Bertie the day before the King died in February 1952. After Maurice died three years later, Ruth became a lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother, and they remained close until Ruth’s death in 1993.

Johnny and Frances met at her coming-out ball at Londonderry House in Park Lane. He was supposedly already engaged to Lady Anne Coke of Holkham Hall, eldest daughter of the Earl and Countess of Leicester, and there was a sharp intake of breath in aristocratic drawing rooms when he ditched her for Frances Roche. The Queen is said to have tried to distract him by taking him with her on a tour of Australia for six months as Master of the Household, but after seeing the daily flow of letters between them, she gave him permission to go home and prepare for the wedding.

They married in Westminster Abbey in 1954. It was the society wedding of the year, attended by fifteen hundred guests, including the Queen, the Queen Mother, Prince Philip and Princess Margaret. ‘You are making an addition to the home life of your country,’ the Bishop of Norwich had declared prophetically, ‘on which above all others, our national life depends.’ Who could have guessed that their fourth child would be the mother of a future King?

Their first child, Sarah, was born in Northampton in March 1955, nine months after the wedding, and was christened in Westminster Abbey with the Queen Mother as one of her godparents. They had started out in a rented house in Rodmarton near Cirencester, where Johnny was studying at the Royal Agricultural College, but by the time Sarah was born they were living in a cottage on his father’s estate at Althorp. His father was a difficult man, and it didn’t help that Frances refused to kowtow to him. It was a relief all round when, after the death of Lord Fermoy later that year, Ruth suggested that Frances and Johnny take over Park House. It was a large family home with ten bedrooms, extended servants’ quarters and garages.

Their second daughter, Jane, was born in King’s Lynn in 1957, and this time the Duke of Kent was a godfather. Two years later Frances was pregnant again and, on 12 January 1960, gave birth to a boy – the all-important son and heir – in her bedroom at Park House. They named him John but, tragically, he lived for only ten hours.

Frances plunged into depression after her baby’s death. Her marriage had not turned out to be the blissful union she had imagined. Johnny, who, as an older man, had seemed the embodiment of sophistication and excitement, had settled comfortably into monotony and middle age, while she was still just twenty-four, full of sparkle and wanting more from life.

More to the point, behind closed doors he was not the mild, kindly gentleman that his wide circle of friends and neighbours thought they knew. To them he was affectionate and witty, an entertaining addition to any gathering. In the privacy of his own home, he was altogether more physical and frightening. His mother, Cynthia, had put up with years of abuse from the 7th Earl and Frances endured the same. It clearly ran in the family.

Today there are refuges for women who are victims of domestic violence and the subject is often spoken about, but even today those women, even if they do seek help, often choose to stay with their abuser, believing that in some way they are to blame. In 1960, there was no help to be had and no real understanding of the scale or severity of the problem. Had she been able to confide in anyone, they would probably not have believed her; not have believed that such a thing was possible in a man so well bred and so well connected.

So Frances continued to live with Johnny and to keep trying for the boy that she knew he so desperately wanted.

Later that year she became pregnant again, and on Saturday 1 July 1961, Diana was born at Park House. She weighed 7 lb 12 oz and was hailed by her father as ‘a perfect physical specimen’. She was christened at Sandringham church and was, ironically, the only Spencer child not to have a royal godparent.

In May 1964, the long-awaited boy arrived. The relief and excitement were palpable, and at Althorp flags flew in celebration. Charles was christened in grand style in Westminster Abbey, with the Queen a godmother.

Diana was not quite three when Charles was born. She was a happy little girl, secure in the cosy routine of nursery life. But in later years, she looked back and convinced herself that her own birth had been nothing but an inconvenience. Her parents had longed for a boy; ergo, she was unwanted. It was a belief that ate away at her and which she could find no reason to refute.

Life at Park House was typical for a family of their social standing. There were fewer staff now, but they knew their boundaries and the cook would no more change a nappy nor the nanny boil an egg than they would step uninvited beyond the swing door that separated staff from family.

The children lived in the nursery wing consisting of three bedrooms, a bathroom and a large nursery, all on the first floor. Their upbringing was very traditional and as a result they were scrupulously polite and well mannered. A governess came to teach them every morning and in the afternoons they went for a walk in the park or to tea with the children of neighbouring families or shopping in the nearby village with their mother.

There were bicycles and a pony called Romany and their birthdays were always celebrated with parties for their friends; and the Spencer fireworks display on 5 November was a great event in the social calendar. All the local children came and Johnny, as master of ceremonies, let off an arsenal of rockets, whizzers, bangers and squibs, while everyone warmed themselves with sausages around the bonfire.

Kept busy in this way, on the surface the family appeared united, and the children might not have noticed the unhappiness that prevailed beyond the swing door. It must have been a great shock when their mother told them she was leaving home in the autumn of 1967. She explained why but she feared that only the elder children, Sarah and Jane, who had just started boarding school, understood. She had fallen in love with another man, Peter Shand Kydd, and grasped the opportunity to escape her loveless marriage.

Johnny was also shocked. He was possibly the last person to see it coming, but the staff, who heard the ferocious rows, were not surprised and none of them condemned her – indeed one of the housemaids went with her to London as a cook. Condemnation came from the one person Frances might have looked to for support; her own mother, Ruth. She was a snob and was so appalled that her daughter should leave the son of an earl for a man ‘in trade’ – albeit a millionaire – that the pair didn’t speak to each other for years.

Initially, Frances took the younger children and their nanny to live with her in London, and she had every expectation that when her divorce came through she would keep them all. But things didn’t go according to plan.

Peter Shand Kydd was also married with children and his wife soon divorced him for adultery, naming Frances as the other woman. Frances then began proceedings against Johnny on the grounds of cruelty, which he contested and was able to bring as witnesses some of the highest names in the land. Her case collapsed and he divorced her for adultery. In the bitter custody proceedings that followed, Ruth gave evidence against her daughter, claiming Frances was a bad mother. Custody of all four children went to Johnny. Frances was allowed to see them only on specified weekends and for part of the school holidays. She must have been grief-stricken.

Diana, just six when her mother left, was far too young to understand the complexities of the adult world. In her mind the matter was simple: her mother didn’t want her, therefore she must be worthless.

‘It was a very unhappy childhood,’ she told Andrew Morton, the author to whom she famously unburdened herself when her own marriage was falling apart. ‘Always seeing my mother crying … I remember Mummy crying an awful lot and … when we went up for weekends, every Saturday night, standard procedure, she would start crying. What’s the matter, Mummy? Oh, I don’t want you to leave tomorrow.’

Another early memory was hearing Charles sobbing in his bed, crying for their mother. She told Morton that she began to think she was a nuisance and then worked out that because she was born after her dead brother, she must have been a huge disappointment to her parents. ‘Both were crazy to have a son and heir and there comes a third daughter. What a bore, we’re going to have to try again. I’ve recognised that now. I’ve been aware of it and now I recognise it and that’s fine. I accept it.’

She learned to accept all kinds of difficult emotions. Shortly before Diana’s fourteenth birthday, her grandfather, the 7th Earl, died and the family was uprooted from Norfolk. She had to leave the comforts of Park House, her friends and everything she had grown up with for the impersonal grandeur and loneliness of a stately home in Northamptonshire, a county nearly a hundred miles away. With the new house came a formidable stepmother. Her father’s marriage in 1976 to Raine, Countess of Dartmouth, the forceful daughter of the romantic novelist Dame Barbara Cartland, caused terrible upset in the family. None of his children liked her and they resented the way she took over Althorp, reorganised it and starting selling off its treasures.

Three years later her father collapsed in the estate office at Althorp with a massive cerebral haemorrhage that no one expected him to survive. He lay in a coma for four months, while his children awaited the news they dreaded. Just as he was beginning to pull through he developed an abscess on the lung and was again close to death. He was saved by a new drug that Raine discovered in Germany. The Spencer children all acknowledged that she had saved their father’s life, but her conduct did nothing to endear her to them. She guarded him like a hawk during those months in hospital and gave instructions that no one, not even his children, was allowed to see him.

TRAGIC MISMATCH

That June evening in 1982, while the first photographs of the day-old Baby Wales were being broadcast on television and the morning newspapers were building their front pages around him, Charles and Diana went home to Kensington Palace full of hope that a baby would work its magic and bring them closer together.

Their marriage was not yet a year old but already there were serious problems that must have been as distressing as they were apparently insoluble. Within days of announcing their engagement, the Diana who had captivated the Prince of Wales had changed from a happy-go-lucky teenager into a volatile and unpredictable stranger. Charles was mystified and had no idea how to deal with it. The engagement had happened far too early in the relationship – after only a few months – and well before either of them could know whether they were making the right choice. When asked in their televised engagement interview whether they were in love, he had famously and agonisingly said, ‘Whatever in love means,’ while she, quick as a flash, said, ‘Of course!’

The Royal Family has an important relationship with the media. The institution of monarchy might have disappeared years ago had the media not been interested in the comings and goings of the Family and thereby kept alive the public’s interest. But it is true, nonetheless, that media pressure on Charles to find a bride and the constant intrusion before and after the marriage played a significant part in its breakdown.

A lot has been written about the Royal couple’s relationship over the years, by me as well as others, and Charles and Diana both gave differing accounts of it, but since it formed the bedrock of William’s childhood, and explains much about the man he is today, it needs to be retold. So does the part the media played in it, because it was the mistakes of thirty years ago that gave William the determination to make sure that when Kate Middleton was no more than a girlfriend, she was spared the worst of what his mother had to endure.

While staying at Balmoral in the summer of 1980, Diana was spotted by the late veteran royal correspondent, James Whitaker, then working for the Daily Star, whose binoculars were shamelessly trained on Prince Charles while he fished for salmon in the River Dee. Scanning the bank, Whitaker saw a girl he hadn’t seen before, sitting under a tree keeping the Prince company. Whitaker was with his photographer but Diana kept her back to them and neither got a view of her face. All they knew was that Charles had a new girlfriend – and they had a scoop.

It wasn’t long before they worked out who she was and where she lived, and from that day until the engagement was announced five months later, she had no privacy. Photographers camped outside her flat in Fulham, cameras flashed at her, following her wherever she went. Reporters fired questions at her whenever they saw her; they raked through her rubbish, posed as neighbours, anything to get a scrap of information. She handled it well and at times seemed quite pleased; she said good morning politely to the journalists she recognised, called them by name, and inadvertently posed in a see-through summer skirt at the kindergarten where she worked. It was intrusive, aggressive and at times frightening.

In the midst of all this there was an incident involving the Prince of Wales on the royal train, which had stopped at sidings in Wiltshire for the night. The Sunday Mirror was tipped off that a blonde woman, matching Diana’s description, had driven up from London, boarded the train and spent the night, the implication being that she had slept with Prince Charles. The paper contacted Diana for confirmation and, although she denied having been there, the editor was so convinced it was true he published the story anyway.

The result was an immediate and furious reaction from the Queen’s Press Secretary, the late Michael Shea, who normally let inaccuracies, even of this sort, pass. He demanded a retraction, calling the story ‘total fabrication’. A letter to The Times from Diana’s mother soon followed, appealing for an end to it all. ‘In recent weeks,’ she wrote, ‘many articles have been labelled exclusive quotes, when the plain truth is that my daughter has not spoken the words attributed to her. Fanciful speculation, if it is in good taste, is one thing, but this can be embarrassing. Lies are quite another matter, and by their very nature, hurtful and inexcusable … May I ask the editors of Fleet Street, whether, in the execution of their jobs, they consider it necessary or fair to harass my daughter daily from dawn until well after dusk? Is it fair to ask any human being, regardless of circumstances, to be treated in this way? The freedom of the press was granted by law by public demand, for very good reasons. But when these privileges are abused, can the press command any respect, or expect to be shown any respect?’

Sixty MPs tabled a motion in the House of Commons ‘deploring the manner in which Lady Diana Spencer is treated by the media’ and ‘calling upon those responsible to have more concern for individual privacy’. Fleet Street editors met senior members of the Press Council to discuss the situation. It was the first time in its twenty-seven-year history that such an extraordinary meeting had been convened, but it did nothing to stop the harassment.

It was against this backdrop that the Duke of Edinburgh wrote to Charles. He told him he must make up his mind about Diana. It was not fair to keep her dangling on a string. She had been seen without a chaperone at Balmoral and her reputation was in danger of being tarnished. If he was going to marry her he should get on and do it; if not, he should end it.

If only father and son had been able to discuss the situation face to face, instead of relying on letters, everyone might have been saved years of unhappiness. Charles, mistakenly, took it as an ultimatum to marry and, even though there were serious doubts in his mind about his feelings for Diana, he knew that everyone else seemed to love her, and therefore he did as his father asked. He confessed to a friend that he was in a ‘confused and anxious state of mind’. To another he said, ‘It is just a matter of taking an unusual plunge into some rather unknown circumstances that inevitably disturbs me but I expect it will be the right thing in the end … It all seems ridiculous, because I do very much want to do the right thing for this country and for my family – but I’m terrified sometimes of making a promise and then perhaps living to regret it.’

He sought the advice of his beloved grandmother, the Queen Mother, who was enthusiastically in favour of the match. She was as enchanted by Diana as everyone else, and she was the granddaughter of her lady-in-waiting, Ruth, Lady Fermoy. The Queen gave no opinion, but almost everyone else whose views he canvassed thought Diana was the ideal bride. The only words of caution were to do with how few interests they had in common, and one friend was worried that Diana was a little bit in love with the idea of becoming a Princess but had no real understanding of what it would entail.

As Patty Palmer-Tomkinson, one of the Prince’s oldest friends, who was staying at Balmoral with her husband in the summer of 1980, told Jonathan Dimbleby, the Prince’s authorised biographer: ‘We went stalking together, we got hot, we got tired, she fell into a bog, she got covered in mud, laughed her head off, got puce in the face, hair glued to her forehead because it was pouring with rain … she was a sort of wonderful English schoolgirl who was game for anything, naturally young but sweet and clearly determined and enthusiastic about him, very much wanted him.’

No one who spent time with her during the next six months – not Charles nor any of his friends or family – suspected she was anything other than Patty described, because Diana was good at hiding her feelings and keeping the hurt buried deep inside. No one spotted that she was in any way more complicated than she seemed, far less that she was suffering from any sort of incipient mental illness.

The people who did know, kept quiet. A month before her death in July 1993, when the marriage was in ruins and their public feuding at its height, Ruth, Lady Fermoy, told the Prince that she had known Diana was ‘a dishonest and difficult’ girl and wished she had screwed up her courage to tell him he shouldn’t marry her. Even Diana’s father, who died in 1991, said before he died that he had been wrong not to say something to warn Charles. They both knew that Diana had been badly affected by the traumas of her childhood and that in marrying her, Charles was taking on an almost impossible task.

THE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM

The cracks began to show when Diana was removed from her bustling flat in Fulham, which she shared with three young friends, to a suite of rooms at Buckingham Palace. It must have stirred up memories of the painful move from Park House to Althorp, only this time she was among strangers and it wasn’t so easy to seek out the kitchen staff for company. The contrast could not have been more extreme, and while everyone within the Palace was kind to her, and went out of their way to be helpful, they were no substitute for her teenage girlfriends.

As one of them said, ‘She went to live at Buckingham Palace and then the tears started. This little thing got so thin. She wasn’t happy, she was suddenly plunged into all this pressure and it was a nightmare for her.’

‘Is it all right if I call you Michael, like His Royal Highness does?’ Diana asked Michael Colborne, a friendly father figure who was the Prince’s right-hand man and with whom she shared an office.

‘Of course,’ he said.

‘Will you call me Diana?’

‘No,’ said Colborne. ‘Certainly not. I appreciate what you’ve just said, but if it all works out you’re going to be the Princess of Wales and I’ll have to call you Ma’am then, so we might as well start now.’

He wasn’t being unkind, he was simply being truthful. She was joining a traditional, formal and hiearchical institution and, however close they came to members of the Family, courtiers never allowed themselves to believe that they were anything other than servants. The adjustment was hard for a young girl who had spent hours sharing confidences with the kitchen staff at Althorp.

Who knows how she imagined life would be with Charles? She had never watched a couple play happy families. Her role models were probably taken from magazines and the idealised plots of the Barbara Cartland romantic novels she had grown up with. She certainly hadn’t expected that marriage would leave her feeling so lonely.

But she was marrying a man who was already heavily engaged in royal duties. Almost every day took him to a different part of the country. Immediately after her arrival at Buckingham Palace Charles had left for a five-week foreign tour, organised long before their engagement. His diary was set six months in advance and there was no room for manoeuvre; any cancellation, he knew, meant letting people down and he was too conscientious to even contemplate it. Whatever he might have wanted privately, duty and discipline were second nature to him; he had been brought up to respect both, whereas Diana had never had occasion for either. She was charm personified and had excellent manners – she would have written and sealed a thank-you letter to a dinner party host that same evening before their heads had touched the pillow – but she had never stuck with something that she found hard going.

Charles was thirty-two years old and he longed for a happy and companionable family life with children that so many of his friends had; but his lifestyle was well established. He worked hard and he played hard – hunting and shooting in the winter, polo and fishing in the summer; he had a close, if curious, family who traditionally spent high days and holidays together; and when he wasn’t working or with family, he had a wide circle of friends whose company he enjoyed.

He imagined that Diana would fit into his world without his having to change. He assumed that she would like his friends as much as he did, enjoy his country pursuits, share his passion for gardening, opera and old churches and be happy to settle down companionably with a good book and some classical music. He imagined that because she was so young she would easily adapt and fit into everything that royal life demanded.

But she didn’t. Despite having been brought up in the country, she was only nineteen years old and, not surprisingly, was far happier in the city. She hated horses and had no interest in taking part in field sports. Like most teenage girls she read trashy novels and magazines rather than literature and philosophy; she listened to pop rather than classical music (although she came to appreciate it and always loved ballet) and would much rather have spent a day gossiping over lunch with a friend, shopping or watching a good film than digging and weeding or sitting on a hillside with a sketch pad.

Charles had little experience of putting himself in other people’s shoes and was surprisingly naive. He didn’t see that Diana might have a problem with his former girlfriend remaining in his circle of friends. As he saw it, he had chosen Diana as the one he wanted to marry and his romantic involvement with Camilla was over. It never crossed his mind that Diana might be suspicious that they were still involved or that he loved Camilla more than her. Finding a gold bracelet he had bought for her on Michael Colborne’s desk was, in Diana’s mind, all the proof she needed. It had a blue enamel disc with the initials GF, which stood for Girl Friday, his nickname for Camilla. Diana was convinced the entwined letters stood for Gladys and Fred, the names she thought they called each other and felt nothing but ‘Rage, rage, rage!’ It was, however, one of several pieces of jewellery he had bought for special friends as a means of saying thank you for having looked after him in his bachelor years.

Diana told Andrew Morton she had felt like ‘a lamb to the slaughter’ as she walked up the aisle at St Paul’s Cathedral on their wedding day in 1981. Her sisters, Sarah and Jane, have told friends they will always feel guilty for not helping her when she said she wanted to back out at the eleventh hour. Either way, there is no doubt that when the world thought they were witnessing a fairytale and celebrated with abandon, both Charles and Diana knew that something was amiss.

The honeymoon was hardly an intimate getaway à deux. After three nights at Broadlands, Lord Mountbatten’s former home, where Charles had entertained previous girlfriends, they cruised the Mediterranean on the royal yacht Britannia, along with a crew of 256, a valet, a Private Secretary and an equerry. During the day Charles would sit blissfully immersed in a Laurens van der Post book, while Diana, according to him, dashed about chatting up the crew and the cooks in the galley. They would have seen a happy-go-lucky girl who made them all laugh. But Diana confided to friends that physically the honeymoon was a disaster, and beneath the cheerful exterior the old feelings of rejection were bubbling away. There were fearsome rows and rages and tears, and during the final stage of the honeymoon, spent at Balmoral stalking and fishing with family and friends (not many people’s idea of a honeymoon), Diana had lost so much weight that Charles arranged for her to see a psychiatrist in London. Even her fingers were noticeably thinner; her wedding ring no longer fitted and had to be made smaller.

The medical profession’s understanding of eating disorders is imprecise even today. Thirty years ago, when Diana first displayed symptoms, most people had never heard of anorexia or bulimia.

As Diana